Now that broadband penetration has flattened out, Parks Associates’ Tom Kerber, director of research for home controls and energy, said telecom providers are looking for ways to bring in additional revenues through services such as home automation, online tech support and digital lockers.

“It is to some extent about maintaining share, and potentially gaining share, but also about that incremental revenue and RPU,” he said. “It’s a little too early to tell [about churn], but I will say we had asked the question, ‘Would you switch for someone that had this service?’ And the answer was roughly 15 percent had very high interest in switching for someone who had a home automation/home control system. I think when you’re in a mature market, it’s about fighting for those customers.”

Kerber said that while telecommunications providers have the advantage of offering home automation services over their data pipes to their subscribers, an HVAC vendor, such as Trane, can upsell a customer on its home security service at the point of sale for an air conditioner. Heynen said that cable operators also face stiff competition from entrenched home security companies such as ADT.

While Comcast’s Bowling said he sees home automation as a greenfield opportunity, the lure of potential revenues has also attracted the attention of retailers and utilities in addition to service providers and traditional security firms. According to Parks Associates, annual subscription revenues from the various system offerings will be more than $180 million by 2015. Parks estimates that 60 percent of homes across the nation will have some type of networked energy management system by 2022.

From the article, "Home automation: The new frontier for service providers" by Mike Robuck.

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