Blog articles from 04/2019

2019 began with 235 OTT video services operating in the US, not including services available through single aggregators such as VRV, Roku, or Amazon Channels. This figure speaks to the massive shift in content consumption since Netflix’s streaming video introduction in 2007. While the net service count in the market has seen a CAGR of 23% from 2013 to 2018, growth has slowed considerably over this time period, from a high of 24% in 2015 to just 1% in 2018. This slowdown in growth...

Parks Associates research shows the average US broadband household owns 10.5 connected devices (including computing, mobile, smart home, and connected health devices), as well as smart speakers with voice assistants. Sixty percent of smart home device purchase intenders find it very important for their future smart home devices to work with the smart products they already own. Smart home platforms help establish order out of the chaos that comes from the steady influx of connected...

Some people love being scared. Whether the villain is a poltergeist, masked killer, creepy doll, or some rabid beastie, they delight in having their worst fears realized on the screen of their choice. For some OTT services (and their executives), the horror show has been all too real. An increasing number of services are landing in the OTT video graveyard. Just as in many scary movies, the causes are all too predictable. Big competition in a small niche. Many services focus on a...

Over the past few weeks, Nest customers experienced a series of hacks including a highly publicized news story where a stranger started talking to a five-year-old boy through the Nest security camera that was mounted on the wall in his bedroom. Google insists that these problems are not the result of problems with their own security protocols or a compromise to their system, but the result of consumers using unsecure login credentials to manage their Nest account, including recycled...