Smart Home Market To Solidify In 2017, Say Analysts

Data gathered by Juniper Research has indicated that the rapid take-up of smart home hardware and services in entertainment, automation, healthcare and connected devices is set to raise revenues from $83 billion in 2017 to $195 billion by 2021.

The firm’s research paper, Smart Home Markets: Entertainment, Monitoring, Automation, Health, Metering, Appliances 2017-2021, claims that automation and smart appliances markets will experience their most-rapid growth yet as more appliance manufacturers integrate connectivity into their devices.

They say that Apple, Amazon, Alphabet and Samsung are set to play a major role in solidifying the market, leveraging both their cloud services and existing bases.

However, of those four tech giants, Juniper says Amazon’s innovation, its use of cloud services in Amazon Alexa and ability to capitalise on its eCommerce platforms will give them a leading position going forward.

Research author Sam Barker commented, saying “The company has managed to maximise its value proposition for Alexa by partnering with a large range of complementary players in the market, whilst utilising its own cloud platform to set Echo and Alexa apart from its competitors in terms of functionality.”

Juniper added that growing segments such as Monitoring and Automation could prove to be major disruptions to the dominance of these established players.

The other important thing established by the research was that this rapid growth for smart homes will see entertainment lose a significant amount of its market share to smart appliances.

The research suggests that Netflix and Amazon’s smart entertainment offerings will fall from 70% ton 50% of the total smart home hardware and services market by 2021.