Providing market intelligence for more than 35 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

Consumer Awareness Of VR Technology Is Low

“Despite the recent industry excitement around VR, overall consumer awareness of this technology is low< " according to Brett Sappington of Parks Associates. “Virtual reality has the potential to h...

Voice Recognition Software Drive New IoT Use Cases

“Over 70% of voice-recognition users are satisfied with the experience of using this solution on their smartphones, which is driving experimentation with this functionality on other platforms, includi...

Monetising OTT: The Key Factors

Speaking in a presentation at Broadband World Forum entitled Making money in the new world of video, Brett Sappington, he said that there had been a rush to OTT in the last few years. In the US, for i...

You don’t have to feel guilty about sharing your TV log-in

Last year, research firm Parks Associates found that 16 percent of U.S. households with broadband admitted either borrowing video log-ins or sharing their own credentials. For many people under 40, sh...