D-Link is the latest smart home company to announce compatibility with Amazon Echo for voice control. Owners of D-Link smart plugs can control power to anything plugged into the Wi-Fi-enabled plugs with a command to the Alexa voice service, D-Link said. The mydlink Home app also includes IFTTT (If This Then That) support, said the company.

Some 65 percent of U.S. broadband homes with a security system plan to buy a smart home device in the next 12 months, a Parks Associates report said Friday. Nearly 20 percent of U.S. broadband households own at least one smart home device, and over half of those also have a security system, Parks said. "Security households, rather than being content with their current system, have a proclivity to add more smart features to their home,” said Parks Associates President Stuart Sikes. Roughly 70 percent of U.S. security dealers install some type of interactive smart home device or system within their residential offerings or plan to do so within the next 12 months, Parks said. Nearly three-quarters of security dealers offer interactivity with smart home devices that can be controlled through smartphones, tablets and computers, it said. Forty percent of security system installations last year included system interactivity and enhanced smart home features, up from 31 percent in 2014, it said. Dealer revenue for smart home services averages $14 per month, Parks said.

Home automation sales jumped 41 percent in 2015 over 2014, said an NPD report Tuesday. Sixty-four percent of smart home product owners have used a smartphone to control or monitor their home automation devices, said NPD. High usage of smartphones as controllers is due to high Android and iOS app compatibility, said analyst John Buffone. As apps and devices become more intuitive, voice recognition and voice control will play a more prominent role in the growing smart home market, Buffone said. Nearly 73 percent of smart home owners use voice commands to control their system, and 61 percent of those want more voice control capability, NPD said. New products including the Amazon Echo are driving increased use of voice control in the smart home, it said.

Sixteen percent of broadband homes in Texas own a smart energy device -- such as a thermostat, light bulb, power strip, outlet or plug/adapter -- compared with 12 percent of all U.S. broadband homes, a report by Parks Associates said. “Texans are slightly ahead of the curve when it comes to buying smart energy devices,” Parks Associates President Stuart Sikes said. “Texas companies including Austin Energy and Reliant have been strong leaders in driving consumer awareness of energy programs and products -- 36 percent of Texas broadband households are familiar with energy monitoring and management products, compared to 28 percent nationwide.” In the past year, 12 percent of Texas broadband households bought or received a smart energy device, while nationwide, 9 percent of broadband households bought such a device in the same period.

The FCC’s draft proposed changes to set-top box rules could help “loosen the stranglehold” cable companies have over program guide information, the Alliance for Community Media said in an ex parte filing in docket 15-64 Monday. “PEG organizations are systematically prevented from providing program guide metadata by cable providers which control access to the navigation systems on their set-top boxes,” ACM said. “This means that local governments are unable to direct citizens to program guides to find vital civic information.” The group said it intends to file comments in support of the coming (see 1601270064) FCC proposals.

California Public Utilities Commission review of Charter Communications' buying Bright House Networks and Time Warner Cable potentially "can be accelerated," TWC CEO Rob Marcus said in a conference call Thursday as the company announced earnings. On regulatory approval of the $89.1 billion pair of deals, Marcus said TWC and Charter are "working constructively with FCC, and DOJ to ensure that they are in a position to approve the deal expeditiously," though he said he couldn't give a timetable for closing. California has said it's on track to make a decision in June on the deals (see 1601130060). Marcus also said TWC is beta testing in New York City an IP video product "that eliminates the need for a leased set-top box." For the year, TWC said it spent $5.82 billion on programming and content, up nearly 10 percent from 2014. Marcus said the cable industry is in the "very early days" of offering content a la carte -- a trend that could shift leverage and lead to slower programing cost growth. When asked about Verizon's small-bundle Custom TV package, Marcus said, "The only reason that we haven't run headlong into a custom TV-type solution is that we've really made a great effort to simplify our offerings as we tried to turn our residential business around, and keeping things simple," with that approach helping in the company's customer numbers -- ending the year up 32,000 video customers.

The Nest customer support page has a 10-step program for thermostats that won’t turn on after a recent software update. The instructions are a fix for a software update to version 5.1.3 or later that may cause Nest thermostats to become “unresponsive or may not charge the battery efficiently,” the website said. Issues customers may encounter: The thermostat is off in the Nest app and is disconnected from Wi-Fi; the thermostat says the battery is low and needs to shut down; animations are slower than usual; a message says to remove the thermostat from the base and reattach it; the display is dark and unresponsive or has a blinking red or green light; the thermostat can’t control the heating or cooling system.

Honeywell announced integration with SmartThings for its first- and second-generation Lyric thermostats. Consumers who own the thermostats can now adjust temperature through a Samsung SmartThings Hub ($99) and mobile app, Honeywell said. Other Honeywell thermostats, including the Wi-Fi Smart and RedLink models, will be compatible in the future, the company said Thursday. Also in the future, Honeywell and SmartThings products will be able to interact through the same cloud technology, allowing homeowners to manage SmartThings-enabled products from their mobile devices, it said.

By 2025, 66 percent of U.S. broadband homes will have at least one smart home product, up from 20 percent today, said a Parks Associates report. Citing product introductions at CES, Research Director Brett Sappington said consumers will interact with IoT devices in new ways. He cited the Oculus Touch controller for haptic feedback used in virtual reality gaming, Netatmo’s home security camera that uses facial recognition to identify and respond to people in the home, and gesture controlled devices shown by Moen and Ubiquilux. "As home automation solutions become more common and affordable, interoperability will be a differentiator,” said Parks Associates President Stuart Sikes. Bluetooth Smart has a competitive advantage through its integration into all major operating systems, “enabling a plug-and-play experience,” said Sikes.

Smart home device sales will nearly double over the next 12 months, as the groundwork and service offerings developed over the past few years lead to wider adoption, said an ABI Research report Wednesday. Hardware sales will continue to dominate smart home revenue over the next five years, but ABI said a transition to recurring service revenue “is well underway.” Recurring service revenue is projected to be close to a quarter of total smart home revenue by 2020, driven by providers including ADT, AT&T, Comcast, Deutsche Telekom, Lowes, Staples and Vivint, ABI said. In addition, a new generation of do-it-yourself smart home devices and systems from startups and from tech giants Google and Samsung is driving recurring revenue through data collection and storage, it said. Following the home security market model, managed smart home system pricing is set up to win new consumers with reduced device and equipment sales in return for long-term recurring revenue, analyst Jonathan Collins said. Security providers lead in the deployment of smart home systems now, but by 2020, cable companies, telcos and retailers will share similar subscriber bases, he said. How smoothly those providers can steer customers away from DIY installations to managed system subscription services will determine much of the growth in recurring revenue. “Smart home service providers are increasingly bringing the most popular DIY devices, such as the Nest thermostat, into their managed service offerings,” Collins said. But he said that consumers will increasingly expect that integration to be available “in an ad-hoc nature.”