CES 2017: Partnerships, Integrated Ecosystems Will Drive Smart Home Scale

Las Vegas—Building partnerships with device makers and stitching them into an integrated platform and ecosystem will help smart home services break into the consumer mainstream and drive true scale, according to Daniel Herscovici, senior VP and GM of Comcast Xfinity Home.

Herscovici, who spoke Wednesday at the Parks Associates Connections Summit at CES about connected home integration, partnerships and security, said a fully supported and supplied ecosystem will help to push subscriber levels well past the tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands. For its part, Xfinity Home has more than 500,000 subs (Comcast hasn’t updated that figure since last summer), but Herscovici claimed that Comcast is now the fastest-growing home security company in the country.

Consumers now have a “premium expectation” that smart home devices will work together, agreed François Girodolle, head of European developer relations for Nest Labs.

That is also reflected in some recent research from Parks Associates, which found, for example, that 60% of networked camera owners want those devices to work with door locks.

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