Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

Network Security: Hacking Fears Could Scare Consumers Away from Smart-Home Devices

The rising occurrence of high-profile security hacks and privacy breaches, as well as being personally victimized, are contributing to ever-increasing consumer anxiety about smart home devices and platforms, according to new research.

Parks Associates’ latest quarterly survey of 10,000 U.S. broadband households found that almost half of consumers rank data security and privacy issues as their greatest concerns about connecting devices to the Internet, compared to other problems they may encounter, such as with tech support. Forty percent of the respondents say they have experienced a privacy or security problem with a connected device in the past year, most commonly viruses and malware.

“Our most recent data reveals that almost half of U.S. broadband households are ‘very concerned’ [rating 6-7 on a 7-point scale] about hackers getting control of connected devices and hackers getting access to data from the device,” says Parks Associates Research Analyst Brad Russell. “In tracing trending changes on these consumer attitudes from 2014 to 2016, we find that while the total share of consumers who are ‘concerned’ [rating 5-7] has not appreciably changed, the share of those that are ‘very concerned’ has grown by 6% to 7%. Similarly, the share of consumers who are ‘not concerned [rating 1-3] has shrunk by about half.”

From the article "Network Security: Hacking Fears Could Scare Consumers Away from Smart-Home Devices" by Rodney Bosch.

Previously In The News

As Fire TV passes 30M users, Amazon execs eye more voice integrations and global expansion

More and more people are watching TV and movies with over-the-top devices. Streaming device ownership spiked from six percent of U.S. broadband households in 2010 to almost 40 percent last year, accor...

HBO Max: WarnerMedia in Talks With Roku on Deal, Amazon Fire TV Appears to Be a No-Go

Beyond rev-share terms for HBO Max, holdouts like Roku and Amazon — which together had 69% market share of U.S. OTT households in early 2019, Parks Associates estimated — are objecting to WarnerMedia’...

HBO Now Has 800,000 Paying Subscribers Since April Launch

“In the past year we keep seeing more and more services coming up, more niche services,” said Glenn Hower, an analyst with market research firm Parks Associates. There’s Netflix, which has been str...

Comcast is totally okay with you not having an Xfinity set-top box

“Pay-TV providers want to retain subscribers, so they want to make sure that you stay inside their ecosystem,” says Brett Sappington, a media analyst at Parks Associates. “If you don’t have a reason t...