Entering the ‘Internet of Services’

Smart Home roundtable: 

Entering the ‘Internet of Services’

Last month’s IBC saw plenty of speculation about IoT in general and the Smart Home in particular – specifically how they were going to impact home entertainment. IP&TV News’ Thomas Noszczak decided to gather the thoughts of six leading solutions providers in the ecosystem, to sound them out on one of the fundamental shifts in perception that seems to be taking place in this area.

He asked: “If we are moving from the Internet of Things to the Internet of Services, how can we best engage the consumer in this new ecosystem?”

Here’s what they told him…

Ceece Links

Cees Links, Founder & CEO, GreenPeak:
Consumers are not interested in things – they do not want an Internet of Things. Instead they want services – delivered using the latest technologies and connectivity that make their lives safer, smarter, more comfortable and more convenient.

What do consumers want? They want smart security, smart environmental control, smart energy, smart lifestyle monitoring. They want services that they do not have to install and set up – they want services that learn how they and their families live their lives and then automatically configure the house to the needs and schedules of the people living inside.

Currently the tech industry is marketing this new generation of smart solutions as a collection of things to be bought, installed and configured together. Aside from tech early innovators and earnest DIYers, consumers do not want to do it all themselves. They want solutions that work right out of the box.

Benn Bennett

Ben Bennett, SVP Business Development, Irdeto:
As services have evolved, so has cybercrime. Today’s cybercrime environment can almost be described as “Hacking as a Service” with criminal tools such as ransomware available for purchase and botnets for rent by the hour.

Consumers depend on Service Providers to stay ahead of the ever-increasing array of cyber threats to their homes; to be the security gatekeeper and remove privacy or security implications. In order to meet these expectations providers will need to implement systems that provide protection, intelligence and control for IP connected devices in the home environment, while at the same time making sure this additional security is seamlessly integrated so it does not impact the overall consumer experience.

Joep van Eijden

Joep van Eijden, Sigma Designs:
Today’s consumers are accustomed to the idea of a specific app that controls a specific task or device, a paradigm ingrained from this decade of the smartphone’s evolution.

With so many new IoT devices and data points soon to be relevant in and out of the home, consumers will want a new control model; one-to-one is no longer adequate.

Security companies, telecommunications providers, retailers, STB makers and others will compete to provide the “command center” experience in the connected home. The brands that can reliably combine the most interoperable devices and create the most seamless experiences will inevitably gain and maintain the most user affection.

Darrell A. Haber

Darrell A. Haber, VP of Marketing and Strategic Alliances, Skyworth: 
As MSO’s search for ways to increase revenue, they will look to provide new value-added services beyond their traditional businesses.  The IoT brings new opportunities for the MSO to take a more active role with their customers and potentially act as gatekeepers for all IoT services.

The strength in these offerings will hinge on the MSO being able to turn a literal broadband gateway into a figurative “gateway to the world”.  The termination point of the internet in the house has become the most important point in the daily lives of consumers and has largely been ignored beyond delivering traditional triple-play services.  MSO’s must seize the opportunity to expand their offerings through home automation and control, home security and home media management.  

Benoit Joly

Benoit Joly, SVP Smart Home, Technicolor Connected Home: The more developers will be able to create scenarios based on multiple devices talking to each other, the more hype and end-user engagement they will generate.

Technicolor’s ize offers digital concierge services similar to what everyone know in real life: A nurse, a doorman, a caretaker, a guard… We use sensors and analysis to help you manage your everyday life, from anywhere. This is very different from selling isolated connected products with a single function.

With ize the operator TV services are part of the smart home experience. This allows Network Services Providers to market it easily, adding parental control, gaming and other OTT apps to their current offering. For example, parents can receive a notification when a child wants to watch TV. Or you can see who is ringing at your door on the TV screen. It’s a greater integrated consumer experience than having separate solutions that don’t talk to each other.

Roberto Pellegrini

Roberto Pellegrini, VP Strategic Marketing and Business IoT, ADB: 
At ADB we advocate IoT is a tool for business model innovation, able to create new “services” opportunities even for sectors who consider pure “products” as their core business.

IoT creates the opportunity to manage and evolve the interaction between end users and products over time, and can evolve from insight purely on the product’s lifecycle to insight on use cases: this is the premise for the creation of a “service” proposition attached to a traditional “product” proposition.

More importantly, the ability to create collaborations with other industries’ applications, can lead to “loosely” bundled service propositions which are particularly attractive for end users, as they augment the utility of products with respect to their stand-alone usage. This is applicable equally to B2C and to B2B industries.


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