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

Over 60% of Free Trial Users Will Pay for Service: Vimeo Report

For services considering offering a free trial, Vimeo says having an app is helpful. Potential customers are 33 percent more likely to sign up for a free trial through an app than through a website. S...

One-Third of U.S. Broadband Households Have Multiple OTT Subs

According to the researchers at Parks Associates, 31 percent of all U.S. broadband-enabled homes have multiple over-the-top (OTT) service subscriptions. Also, 63 percent subscribe to at least one OTT...

Roku is Making TV Speakers, But They Only Work with Roku TVS

The idea behind this is that if your TV sounds better, people will stream more, which is the metric Roku cares most about, Klarke says. Roku likes to say that it's the US's number one streaming conten...

Report: Connected Home Consumers Want Data Security Support

Several recent studies have shown that security and privacy are top of mind for consumers considering Internet of Things devices for their homes. Parks Associates back in October noted around 40 pe...