CED Magazine

"In addressing the low consumer awareness for smart home solutions, all players have ample opportunities to make inroads in this early market," Eddie Accomando, research analyst at Parks Associates says. "Roughly 40 percent of the U.S. broadband households familiar with smart home products or services learned about them from TV or the Internet. In 2016 we are seeing smart home companies develop more robust TV and Internet consumer marketing strategies to reach the consumers who ...read more

About a quarter of U.S. broadband households are concerned about their privacy and security when using connected CE devices, according to a new Parks Associates white paper, sponsored by Verimatrix. The research notes that video service operators, under pressure to provide a personalized experience to viewers, are expanding their video data analytics strategies and so experience several new risk factors impacting customer privacy and integrity of the data caused by cloud connect ...read more

Speakers from Comcast, AT&T Digital Life, Schneider Electric, Vivint Smart Home, Rovi and Hewlett-Packard and others participated in Parks Associates annual Connections conference in San Francisco this week. Among the topics tackled were business models for the smart home, and the fundamental need for partnerships to make the Internet of Things (IoT) space truly work.

“There are several alternative business models emerging for the smart home, including a two-sided business m ...read more

Parks Associates released new consumer research this week showing that 2 percent of U.S. broadband households, or 2.3 million households, own a virtual reality headset. The survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband households reportedly reveals that 5 percent of U.S. broadband households plan to buy a VR headset in 2016, an increase from only 1 percent who made a purchase the year prior.

“The big change in VR for 2016 has been the availability or pending availability of VR headsets fr ...read more

At the INTX show in Boston this week, OTT services are undoubtedly top-of-mind as service providers consider how to stay on top of all the ways consumers want to access, bundle and buy content. Parks Associates used the confab to roll out new research that shows Roku is still the most popular brand of streaming media players, accounting for 30 percent of the players purchased from Q1 2015 to Q1 2016. Amazon moved into a virtual tie with Google at 22 percent of sales, the researc ...read more

Another report on the topic is just out this week from Parks Associates that predicts 50 percent of North American broadband households will be smart homes by 2020. According to the research firm, ownership of smart home products increased from 16 percent to 19 percent of U.S. broadband households in the last year, and 44 percent of households that do not have a smart home device plan to purchase one in 2016.

Parks says a big driver is the fact that home and consumer-based I ...read more

"Supporting connected consumers is increasingly costly given the growing number of devices in broadband households and the growing technical complexity of these households. Parks Associates research shows that the average broadband household now has over eight connected computing and entertainment devices, compared to 4.6 devices in 2010," Patrice Samuels, research analyst at Parks Associates, says. "More than one-half of consumers now expect support providers to cover multiple ...read more

According to Parks Associates, about 80 percent of caregivers in U.S. broadband households spend more than an hour a day performing their care-giving tasks. And in recent research Parks did with AARP, indicators show that 117 million Americans will need care-giving assistance by 2020, either as care recipients or family caregivers.

The demand for connected health solutions over broadband networks seems clear, but how the market will get there seamlessly is less so.

From ...read more