While not quite the One Ring, the arrival of Matter opens the door for a significant attempt at solving the interoperability problems faced in the smart home. This should catch the eye of our operator crowd, who have viewed that particular endeavor as a major headache that would best be avoided.
Matter is the name of the smart home interoperability specification that Project Connected Home over IP (CHIP) has been working on for the past three years. CHIP was housed inside the Zigbee Alliance, even though CHIP sat at a higher level in the stack than Zigbee’s low power wireless mesh protocol.
To this end, the Zigbee Alliance has rebranded as the Connectivity Standards Alliance (CSA), and CHIP is now overhauling the brand to Matter. To that end, the CSA is going to oversee both Matter and Zigbee, but of course, Matter is meant to be used by multiple radio protocols – including WiFi, Bluetooth, Thread, and Z-Wave.
However, CHIP wasn’t the first to try and create a protocol that would allow devices in proximity to each other to find each other across different radio and communications networks. The Open Connectivity Foundation (OCF), itself the product of the Open Interconnect Consortium (OIC) absorbing the Qualcomm-led AllSeen Alliance, is now out in the lurch – as the momentum seems to be with Matter, and the OCF didn’t really ever achieve much uptake.
Over the past few years, the operator crowd has not had any enthusiasm for embracing the Smart Home as a Service (SHaaS) – expanding into quad and quint play offerings using a very sticky bundle of devices, tightly integrated into the CPE deployed.
However, some collective thinking will have to take place, to find the best position for the operators moving forward. To many consumers, they are simply a broadband utility, and in competitive markets, these consumers will happily move between providers based on price or poor customer experience. To that end, a better smart home integration could swiftly become a competitive advantage, or a way to increase ARPU or reduce churn, in the same way that premium WiFi features did.
Given that Amazon and Google are the biggest players in the consumer smart home market, effectively a duopoly, they need to be courted, to ensure that these existing devices play nicely with an operator ecosystem. Given that they are staunch supporters of Matter, it seems sensible to pursue that avenue. They even settled beef with Apple, as Matter now promises to bridge the HomeKit divide too.
So, if those rivals can make peace, it looks promising for the operator crowd. Separately, we’ve outlined the problem that a growing number of smart home video devices could pose for operators and web infrastructure, by uploading heaps of new video data to the cloud. The ISP networks have been fairly unidirectional since their inception, and the spike in uplink traffic caused by working from home might seem like a minor blip, should the average home have two HD video feeds backing up to a cloud service 24/7.
On this note, Google caught our eye by adding WebRTC support to its Nest devices. It said the move should reduce latency and improve live audio and video streaming between security cameras, video doorbells, smart displays, and mobile devices. Netgear spin-out Arlo, Logitech, Netatmo, and Wyze are the first device partners to integrate WebRTC, and Google says more will shortly be announced.
WebRTC is gaining traction as a way to deliver live video at lower latencies than are possible in traditional CDN architectures. In combination with the new transport protocols trying to solve that same problem, SRT and RIST, it should be possible to deliver video much closer to real-time than is possible currently.
For the smart home use case, it should mean that video that has to travel across cloud-to-cloud integrations arrives in much more usable fashion. Smart home controls have been plagued by latency problems from the off, and as voice and video become more important, WebRTC support should help alleviate some of these headaches.
So, if operator CPE is having to support Matter and WebRTC, there should be more opportunities for WebRTC to be used as a way to deliver video services over the web. And wouldn’t you know it, there’s an opportunity for Android here.
Android in operator set tops is growing in popularity, and there are a lot of Android-based Smart TVs out in the world already. When future versions of Android begin pushing WebRTC and Matter, operators would be wise to take advantage of that opportunity.
Notably, Google has finally deployed its Fuchsia operating system. The first device to get the non-Linux microkernel is the 2018 Nest Hub video hub, which will replace its current Linux-based Cast OS with Fuchsia in an OTA update. Fuchsia has been positioned as an OS for low-power devices, and it will be interesting to see if that definition comes to include CPE like home gateways and set tops.
On the topic of CPE evolutions, Roku has been spotted hiring for smart home roles, looking to develop in-house devices and expand integrations with third-party systems. Damir Skripic, formerly of Amazon, Arlo, and TP-Link’s Kasa smart home project, has joined, as Director of Product Management for Home Technologies. A senior business development management role, to strike third-party partnerships, is still being recruited for.
Roku’s dongles and set tops are ticking along nicely, giving it a solid foundation to build on. Expanding into smart TVs via Roku OS should help in this regard, but there has been little word on the success of its wireless speakers and soundbars – launched in 2018.
The 2019 acquisitions of Dynastorm and Blackfire Research should have bolstered its expertise, but operators should pay attention to Roku’s success here. The smart home devices are an attempt to keep people in the Roku ecosystem, where they can generate advertising revenue off the back of the TV services. There’s little money in devices, but a lot in monetizing an engaged user.