Providing Market Intelligence for 40 Years

In The News

Residential Security: Beyond the Walled Garden

For the independent security dealer, all of these changing customer and technology profiles is already happening. The appeal of the walled garden’s closed system is convenience and usability; however, that point of distinction is being eroded by those same factors.

Parks Associates recently mapped the smart home’s competitive landscape by looking for cues and harbingers in user reviews. What Parks’ Tom Kerber found was that walled garden automation was already showing signs of dying off.

“The breadth of [open] platforms is much more substantial,” Kerber says. “It will be hard to maintain a [vertically integrated] approach, or even, for that matter, a highly curated approach, when a very open approach can provide a similar user experience and provide much more access…to whatever product you may have or want to own.”

If there’s a key takeaway from the Parks Associates study for your purposes, it is this: The move from vertically integrated to open “could happen relatively quickly,” according to Kerber. “Our recommendation to smart home platform providers, as well as service providers, is to plan for that eventuality.”

This means security dealers may need to consider offering a broader range of products, he adds.

From the article "Residential Security: Beyond the Walled Garden" by Shawn Welsh.

Previously In The News

25% Of Smartphone Owners Use Payment Apps Monthly

The report from Parks Associates found that shoppers showed a preference for retailers' mobile payment programs such as Starbucks over larger payment systems including Apple Pay, Google Wallet and And...

More Bad News for Traditional Pay TV

Just when you thought things could not get worse for pay TV… This week Parks Associates published a new survey that showed the number of dissatisfied cable TV subscribers has doubled in just a few...

See Rovi at CONNECTIONS

At Rovi, we believe entertainment discovery should be simple, seamless and personal. We help consumers find content quickly by allowing them to browse, search and even speak to devices, generating rec...

As Cord Cutting Grows 85% of Americans 22–37 Subscribe to a Streaming Service

This week the research group Parks Associates released an updated look at the state of streaming video. According to the study, 85% of American millennials (people born between 1981 and 1996) now subs...