Despite decades of annual double-digit growth, a new report from ABI Research suggests that the smart home market is being held back by the lack of use of smart home data and intelligence.
The global tech market advisory firm has found that the industry is in the earliest stages of leveraging smart home data into more powerful and more valuable consumer products and services.
According to ABI Research, there are multiple industries, currently beyond smart home engagement, that can build valuable applications and services based on the intelligence smart home data can provide.
“At present, there are only costly and limited ways to gain access to even a fraction of that data,” said Jonathan Collins, research director, ABI Research. “But an emerging understanding that the billions of dollars in potential value being lost must be addressed.”
The research highlights that the smart home industry should shift to support more standardised and simple data sharing between smart home players across both OEMs and service providers to capture these untapped revenue streams. This data is currently only used typically by the larger smart home platform providers to support their own core business revenue streams.
Beginning to address the issues, initiatives such as Project CHIP has support from some of the largest players in the market to drive data interoperability between smart home devices and smart home management platforms. The report suggests that the industry will have to come up with similar strategies for making smart home data available from smart home platforms to third part applications in order to generate extra revenue streams and significantly grow the market.
“There are significant issues that smart home players will have to address, not least consumer privacy and data regulation,” continued Collins. “Much of this market will not begin to scale until the middle of the decade. ABI Research expects that by 2030, smart home data access will drive more than a $2.7bn annual smart home market revenue opportunity from just four key vertical market opportunities.”