The Chinese smart home market will enter a stage of large-scale development.

Over the past two years, IDC has been continuously monitoring the market size, competitive landscape, and technological ecosystem development of smart home in China. We have witnessed the exploration process of this market from its embryonic stage to the initial explosion stage. With the arrival of 2020, the smart home market in China will enter a period of large-scale development. The upgrade of connection and interaction will push the industrial intelligence to a broader product range and newer application scenarios. The industry and media transformation brought about by digitalization will create greater consumption impetus and demand for the smart home market.

Pan Xuefei, the China research manager of IDC, believes: In 2020, the smart home market in China will enter a stage of large-scale development. Manufacturers will focus on their core resource advantages and carry out cross-regional and cross-sectoral cooperation within the ecosystem to achieve the integration and optimization of connection, interaction, and services based on the platform, activating more market demands and achieving a scale doubling.

The specific contents of the top ten predictions for smart home in 2020 are as follows:

1. Accelerated integration of interconnection platforms

The integration of interconnection platforms for smart home will be strengthened, and more cooperation will occur among them. It is expected that by 2020, 43% of devices will be able to simultaneously access two or more home interconnection platforms.

2. Widespread empowerment of voice assistants

Voice assistants will gradually be installed on more devices. By 2020, 47% of home devices will have voice assistants. At the same time, the integration degree of content and services behind voice assistants will become increasingly important for their users and scenarios, especially in the fields of mother and child care, education, and elderly care.

3. Significant upgrade of smart TVs

The smart TV market will undergo significant upgrades. In addition to display performance, the interconnection and voice interaction capabilities of smart TVs will rapidly improve. Along with this, the application scenarios of smart TVs will expand from entertainment games to shopping, health, and education. It is expected that by 2020, 57% of smart TVs will be able to access home interconnection platforms, and 22% of smart TVs will have far-field voice capabilities.

4. Rapid development of smart lighting

The smart lighting market will develop rapidly. By 2020, it will grow by more than double. The cooperation between internet manufacturers and lighting manufacturers will further promote the rapid development of this market.

5. Voice assisting home appliances' intelligence

Voice interaction is rapidly penetrating the home appliance market. More and more home appliance devices can be controlled through voice. By 2020, 75% of smart home appliances will be able to be controlled through voice, including two methods of embedding voice assistants and connecting smart speakers. Internet manufacturers will expand their ecosystems, attract more wide-ranging home appliance manufacturers to cooperate, and seek more contact points with users.

6. Diversification of connection methods

The connection methods of smart home will gradually upgrade and diversify. Besides Zigbee, the proportion of Mesh in Bluetooth connections will grow rapidly, reaching 59% by 2020. 5G and WiFi6 will provide better network experiences for other collaborative devices in home entertainment and content service scenarios.

7. Commercial demand stimulating growth

The smart home market will enter the rapid development channel in the hotel and rental housing industries first, especially in security and lighting products. It is expected that by 2020, more hotels and apartments will adopt smart home products, establishing interconnection and achieving digital transformation through rich interaction methods.

8. Rise of visual interaction

The AI capabilities of cameras will rapidly improve and will be widely applied to more smart home devices, jointly building a complete natural interaction experience in visual and voice. By 2020, 3% of smart home devices will support both visual and voice interaction methods. Additionally, sensing interaction technology will also be more widely penetrated in household devices.

9. Voice expanding to consumer scenarios The application scenarios of voice interaction are gradually expanding from entertainment, companionship, and inquiries to various consumption scenarios such as shopping, hailing rides, and ordering food. It is expected that by 2020, 8% of smart home devices will be capable of supporting multiple consumption scenarios.

10. Emerging online marketing accelerates conversion

The live-streaming by influencers promoting products will attract more consumers to come into contact with and try emerging technologies; UGC (user-generated content) such as short videos will visually present the convenience and fun of smart home devices and maximize the effect of word-of-mouth promotion; it is expected that by 2020, more smart home devices will be sold through online live-streaming and short-video promotion.