Verizon, Bright House to sell home automation service

Verizon and Bright House are suddenly in a mad rush to take control of your coffee maker.

The rival companies that already sell telephone, Internet and pay TV now plan to start selling whole-house automation systems that control everything from lights and doors to appliances and video cameras.

Verizon will soon start selling a Home Monitoring Control service, and Bright House will soon start selling a more premium home-monitoring and security service, staffed and connected to police and fire departments.

The projects represent major new lines of business for the rival companies, and a way for them to lock in customers who might otherwise want to switch providers to save a few dollars a month.

"The more services they can get someone to sign up for, the stickier that customer is to them," said Bill Ablondi, director of home systems research for the Parks Associates market research firm.

Having a phone company take over home automation makes some sense, he said, and people are more accustomed to gadgetry like live Internet video and cell phone apps for banking.

Verizon spokesman Bob Elek said the company hasn't settled on a formal launch date for their service, and some of the pricing is yet to be determined. But Verizon this week started training sales and customer service employees on how the system works and how to explain it to customers.

With the Verizon program, customers would first buy a service package at $9.99 per month that both runs the system and allows the customers to control everything through their PCs, TV remotes or cell phones. Then customers would choose three levels of gadgetry to install in their homes.

The first option includes home monitoring so customers could remotely unlock doors and – through a Web browser – peer through security cameras enabled to pan and zoom.

The second option would include energy-monitoring gadgets like an automatic thermostats, special WiFi adapters that control appliances and lights, plus a sensor placed on the home circuit box to measure whole-house energy use. The third option would include both monitoring and energy use.

In one demonstration this week, a make-believe Verizon customer showed how to go online, watch their kitchen through a remote-control video camera, zoom-in on the coffee maker to see the power light, and remotely turned it off.

Rather than adopt any existing equipment on the market for home automation, Verizon plans to sell all the gear involved. For the most part, customers would install that gear themselves, or Verizon will suggest contractors for items like electric circuit panel sensors.

Bright House disclosed fewer details about their project, but Spokesman Joe Durkin said theirs is more akin to the higher-end home security service. Besides offering remote access and control for doors, appliances and energy use, the Bright House system will have company employees monitoring customer's homes as security firms do now, and call for police or fire rescue if needed.

And, the Bright House system is built to be proactive, he said.

"Say you have school-aged children who are supposed to be home by 4 p.m.," Durkin said. "If at 4:01, that front door isn't accessed, you'll get a text message saying that event did not occur."

Bright House hasn't yet disclosed pricing for any new services.

In one sense, Ablondi at Parks Associates said these companies are trying to do for home automation what Apple did for downloading music: Take a market that was highly complex and fragmented, simplify it dramatically, and sell it as a service.

The Bright House and Verizon projects overlap with services from a string of other companies. TECO, for instance, sells an automated home energy system that monitors electricity use and can dial up or down the air conditioning or other appliances.

Ablondi notes that other big communications companies are going in the same direction. Comcast, he notes, now offers home security and monitoring services along the lines of a professional security firm.

Home security company ADT, for one, isn't taking the new competition lying down. Last fall, ADT expanded from home security to start offering remote control of things like lights and thermostats. And they're banking on the company's history to compete.

"We've been in this business for 135 years," said ADT spokesman Bob Tucker, starting with telegraphs and personal security. As for Bright House and Verizon, he said, "Would you really want to trust the security of your home and family to the same people that install HBO?"