In The News

Almost 75% of consumers who said they plan to purchase a smart home device deem it essential that it connects seamlessly to other products in their home electronic network, according to a new study from Parks Associates. The report, Interoperability and the Internet of Things, said this demand is stronger than brand loyalty, with fewer than 60% saying it is important that a future smart device purchase be the same brand as their current products.

From the article "75% of sma ...read more

If any further evidence was needed that living room streaming is now mainstream, consider the following forecast released today by research company Parks Associates: By 2022, over 265 million households worldwide will subscribe to an over-the-top (OTT) video service. Many of those households will pay for multiple services, so Parks estimates they will have over 400 million subscriptions in total.

Parks has seen a steady increase in the sales of connected TVs and streaming me ...read more

Another industry insider, Parks Associates’ Brett Sappington, said during the Pay TV Show last month in Denver that Amazon is the only company to get à la carte TV right and that the company could simply begin offering full pay-TV subscriptions as part of its Prime memberships.

Sappington added that Amazon could afford to give away local broadcast and cable channels for free if it can figure out how to effectively tie its retail offering to that proposition. "Fundamentally, ...read more

BRETT SAPPINGTON, DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT RESEARCH DIRECTOR, PARKS ASSOCIATES, DALLAS:

"If you're AT&T, who do you want to include in your own skinny bundle? The channels you own. This means if you're a small content network, you have less negotiating power, because the bundler owns its own content."

Sappington added that without conditions, AT&T doesn't have to guarantee anything other than its promise that it will play nice with other distributors and content providers.

OTT video is firmly established in the U.S. entertainment marketplace, and new research from Parks Associates only puts an exclamation point on the new reality of how Americans consume video entertainment.

More than two-thirds of U.S. broadband households have an OTT service. But, it is the percentage of U.S. broadband households that have more than one subscription that is more noteworthy.

From the article "The Multiple OTT Service Explosion" by Adam Jacobson.

And these aren’t the only signs that Amazon’s dominance starting to shake. “We are seeing Amazon-branded devices are going down compared to the other players,” Dina Abdelrazik, a smart home research analyst at Parks Associates, told The Ambient. “But Amazon is without a doubt still dominant in the market.”

From the article "For years, Amazon ruled the smart speaker market. Now the crown is slipping" by Hugh Langley.

BRETT SAPPINGTON, DIGITAL ENTERTAINMENT RESEARCH DIRECTOR, PARKS ASSOCIATES, DALLAS:

"If you're AT&T, who do you want to include in your own skinny bundle? The channels you own. This means if you're a small content network, you have less negotiating power, because the bundler owns its own content."

Sappington added that without conditions, AT&T doesn't have to guarantee anything other than its promise that it will play nice with other distributors and content providers.

Parks Associates research finds nearly 40% of U.S. broadband households now have at least two OTT video service subscriptions, according to a report released June 11.

The research firm notes that consumers have reached a new stage in connected entertainment where OTT is a standard source of video and viewers are more willing to experiment with multiple OTT services.

Parks Associates says it will examine this transition for OTT “from disruptor to dominance” in the industr ...read more