Blog articles from 06/2020

The COVID-19 health crisis has fundamentally impacted the lifestyles and routines of all consumers. Shelter-in-place orders and work-at-home mandates have driven in-home video consumption to unprecedented levels, with nearly 3 in 10 US broadband households reporting an increase in usage of online video services and nearly 1 in 5 reporting an increased use of pay-TV services. Parks Associates’ new whitepaper,  Optimizing the Smart TV Experience , in cooperation...

Smart major appliances emerged in the US market in 2011. However, like smart home devices, adoption rates for different categories of smart appliances remain fairly low. Eleven percent of US broadband households report owning a smart appliance. Smart refrigerators, clothes washers, and smart microwaves have highest adoption. Adoption barriers such as high prices, perceived poor value proposition, slow replacement rates, and limited product availability restrain growth in these...

Recent research conducted by Parks Associates, and captured in the report Cloud Gaming: Demand and Preferences , finds nearly a third of US consumers are interested in cloud gaming and game subscription services. These services, including names such as NVIDIA GeForce NOW, Google Stadia, Microsoft’s upcoming Project xCloud, and PlayStation Now, have become hot topics in the gaming space for their attempt to replicate the streaming video service model. With a cloud gaming service,...

Gene Wang, CEO and Co-founder of People Power Company and a member of the advisory board for the upcoming Connected Health Summit, shared his thoughts with Parks Associates on Covid-19's impact on the connected health markets and the healthcare economy ahead of the conference. The Connected Health Summit is a three-day executive conference focused on the impact of connected devices and IoT healthcare solutions on consumers at home and will take place virtually on September 1-3,...

The security of the average home network has become exponentially more critical due to the shelter-in-place and work-at-home policies which have caused more families to live, work, and play at home. Regardless of recent re-openings, many predict that the way we work and live may be fundamentally changed. When remote internet connectivity blurs the line between work and home, cybersecurity takes on a whole new value in addition to the regular concerns of today’s households. The...

Home IoT Device Vulnerability Many consumers are wary of the vulnerabilities that come with IoT devices and the potential for hackers to expose their sensitive data. This is true among the general public, and even more so among those already owning smart home devices. At the end of 2019, nearly half of the segment Parks Associates classifies as the smart home disengaged (the 44% of broadband households not owning or intending to purchase any smart home device), cited data...

Parks Associates is supporting Utility Cloud 2020 , a conference surrounding the topics of integrating cloud solutions to manage the influx of large volumes of data in a dynamic grid environment. This event takes place September 15-17, 2020, in Amsterdam. Drawing together utility software, system and transformation leads, this 3-day case study driven program provides an intensive review of the latest cloud technologies, strategies and solutions to manage an ever-increasing data...

The entertainment industry has experienced significant turmoil in the past five years. Pay-TV cord-cutting and shaving continue, with adoption dropping from a high of 87% of US broadband households in 2014 to 73% in 2020. During the same period, OTT services exploded to more than 200 in the US market alone, and adoption grew from 55% to 76% in the US. Viewing platforms diversified, with content available across a variety of connected video and computing devices. Yet, in the midst of...