What you need to know
The idea of a connected, automated home has been around for years, but we are now at the stage where enough major companies and brands are establishing themselves on the edge of the mainstream market, with products at affordable price points, that it can really be considered something approaching a mass-market proposition. The start of 2016 has seen companies like Google and Samsung make major strides in this direction, the former with the launch of its Google Home in-home personal assistant and the latter embedding IoT Hub technology in all of its 2016 Samsung Smart TVs. While ownership of products like smart thermostats remains fairly low, Mintel’s consumer research shows that interest in future purchases is high, at nearly four in ten consumers, for most of these types of products.
Covered in this Report
This Report looks at the growing range of connected devices and appliances that consumers have in their homes. It also analyses how these devices are becoming increasingly able to send and receive commands to and from each other (sometimes referred to as ‘talking together’), via either manual instruction or automated means.
This is often referred to as ‘home automation’, the idea of an online system being able to control the functionality of several smart devices by either reacting to a set schedule, or from user input, which can sometimes be communicated from a remote location. This could be via a number of different protocols, including Wi-Fi and Bluetooth, among others.
In this Report the concept of the ‘Internet of Things’ (IoT) is another term used to describe the ever-increasing set of smart products that sit within a consumer’s connected ecosystem.
The connected home products included within the scope of Mintel’s consumer research for this Report are:
Smart TVs
Smart heating appliance/thermostats (eg Hive, Nest)
Smart smoke detectors (eg Nest)
Smart door locking systems
Smart kitchen appliances (eg washing machines, fridges, kettles)
Smart surveillance cameras
Smart set-top box/streaming media devices (eg Sky+ box, Apple TV, Google Chromecast)
Smart audio speakers (eg Sonos Play, Amazon Echo).
