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Well to qualify as “smart” Juniper research in their recent white paper Smart Home – Connected Life pdf reckon it needs “ … the following elements:
- Internet Broadband Connection
- Residential Gateway
- Connected devices
- Operations billings and other Value added Service (VAS) “
To us the main prerequisite for a smart home is on the connected infotainment side. This is largely born out by Junipers research which on their segmentation of Entertainment, Computing, Monitoring & control, and Health predicts that the Entertainment share of the worldwide service revenues in 2017 will be nearly $48 billion representing 82% of the total. They also see it as the main driver of an 18% CAGR in the market between 2012 and 2017.
A recent addition to the market is Google’s nexus Q which whilst still somewhat embryonic may prove to be a popular device although we have reservations about the social attributes!
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A brief sortie, initially into the UK provider market lead us to Cyberhomes Ltd and their impressive website where we found a slightly different smart home definition from one of their suppliers Control4.
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Another of their major suppliers – (again a US company hmmmmm) Savant gives us their pictorial definition.
Adding to our preliminary connected infotainment definition we heard in one of the videos a somewhat telling remark which impressed “Almost anything thats electronic can be controlled”. So if it can be controlled it can be connected – like the AGA we highlighted a while back.
So a smart home is one where the majority of electronic devices and systems are controlled through connectivity!
Here are a couple of videos from the above mentioned US suppliers which are good teasers!.
Firstly Control4’s app to control their system:
Secondly here’s Savants virtual tour of a high-tech home. They’re a bit Apple centric but the video is good quality and we loved the ability to return an iPad doc back into a picture just under 5 minutes in now that’s really Smart!
