Do door phone companies need indoor units? asks Oliver Philippou, Senior Analyst for the US-based market research company IHS Inc, on the impact of smart home on the audio and video door phone market.
In recent years there has been a growing interest and adoption of the “smart home” concept in North America. This has been led by service providers using physical security to drive smart home applications. The issue for door phone suppliers is that all of these services are increasingly being integrated and controlled by either a central intelligent alarm control panel, or online via a smart mobile device such as a smartphone or tablet. So what does this mean for the door phone industry?
Even within the door phone industry companies are starting to offer solutions that do not require indoor units. Panasonic offers a wireless monitor that is not fixed to a wall, and companies, such as SkyBell, offer Wi-Fi based door phones. IHS expects that there is still a place for indoor units. Indoor units accounted for 50% of the $2.3 billion world market in 2014, and the market is forecast to grow in line with other component items and villa kits through to 2019. The reason that the smart home market is not expected to significantly impact the use of indoor units in the near future is because of geographic differences:
Whilst there are high-end smart home offerings around the world, the drive to bring the smart home to the mass market is taking place in North America, which at present is a relatively small market for door phones when compared to Europe and Asia.
The European and Asian door phone markets are highly focused on the residential market. Whilst the North American market is heavily focused on commercial end-users.
The type of residential user is very different as well. In Asia door phones are mainly used in high rise flats, where smart home applications are much harder to implement, due to building services normally being managed by the building owners, not the residents. In North America however, proportionally there are many more villa kits and door phones for smaller occupancy buildings sold. These types of products are much easier to integrate with smart home offerings.
