Blog articles from 08/2015

The smart home industry is looking for new growth opportunities, and the Supreme Court’s decision in King v. Burwell has provided stability to the healthcare industry, making it an attractive market for smart home players. The smart home could enable new value propositions in home-based health and wellness solutions and independent living products and services. Parks Associates research shows: By 2019 the number of U.S. homes with a smart home controller will exceed 26...

New digital health research from Parks Associates finds 50% of all U.S. broadband households use at least one healthcare portal per month, but only approximately one-fourth of these users conduct more than one activity per month. The firm finds households with children are much more likely than those without to use specific online health services regularly, including twice as likely to access personal health data, schedule medical appointments, and view test or lab results on a...

Is connected health the future of healthcare? Parks Associates digital health research shows consumers are adopting an ever-increasing number of tools and services that help them measure, track, and better understand their personal health and wellness.  Nearly 30% of U.S. broadband households own a connected health device , and 12% own more than one of these devices.  Jennifer Kent , Director, Research Quality & Product Development at Parks Associates, recently...

In the first quarter of 2015, Parks Associates surveyed U.S. vehicle owners living in broadband households regarding their familiarity with and use of various connected car and connected home services. The results indicate that American drivers are using a variety of connected features in their vehicles, and some express interest in car-to-home crossover features. Parks Associates forecasts that there will be 41 million active Internet connections in U.S. vehicles by the end of 2015. At...

New connected health research from Parks Associates reveals some U.S. digital health device owners are willing to share the personal data generated by these devices in exchange for a health insurance discount. However, the willingness to share data varies based on the device used: 42% of digital pedometer owners are willing to share data for an insurance break 35% of smart watch owners are willing to share data for an insurance discount 26% of sleep-quality...

Credential (password) swapping has become a popular form of piracy in the connected world, one that has received little attention from service providers and content owners when compared to other forms of piracy like signal piracy, physical media piracy, and file sharing. Credential sharing has a measurable impact on video services, particularly in the OTT video service area, which impacts young subscribers most substantially. The impact on OTT video revenues— an estimated $500 million...

The connected car and smart home markets are both at an early stage of development, but in many ways they have been growing in parallel with each other: both are being enabled by falling costs of sensors, networking technologies, and data storage, as well as by expanded cloud services, the mass adoption of smartphones, and consumer demand for the connected lifestyle. In 2015, these ecosystems are beginning to converge, with particular use cases, such as remote home controls,...

According to a recent article in Multichannel News , Verizon Communications has signed a multiplatform deal that will allow the telecom to offer HBO's streaming video service, HBO Now, to more than 100 million of Verizon's digital customers, as well as to non-Verizon mobile device owners. Verizon will offer HBO on its mobile-first video service and to stand-alone broadband customers for $15 a month. According to Parks Associates director of research Brett Sappington , at the...