Amid a flurry of strong metrics reported across its cable and media business divisions for the first quarter, Comcast also revealed Thursday that its 5-year-old Xfinity Home security and automation business has reached the 1 million customer mark.
“Just in our footprint alone, it's a $9 billion opportunity,” said recently appointed Comcast Cable CEO Dave Watson during Thursday’s earnings call. “And so we added the 66,000 for the quarter and just about 1 million customers at this point. So the benefits for home security continue to be in packaging. We have over 90% of our home security customers now subscribing to three or four product bundles and half of these customers are brand new to us.”
The news was accompanied by a graphic by Jackdaw Research analyst Jan Dawson, revealing that Xfinity Home had doubled its customer base over the last eight quarters.
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For Comcast, home security and automation can now be monetized outside its own footprint.
Comcast recently closed on its purchase of Austin, Texas-based home-automation vendor Icontrol Networks, whose client roster not only serves Comcast, but Charter, Cox Communications, Canada’s Rogers Communications and a host of other cable operators around the world.
With Icontrol providing the backbone of these other cable companies’ home automation and security services, Comcast is now managing the home security and automation business of these other cable providers as a white-label business, similar to how it licenses its X1 video platform.
“This announcement will open up a new wholesale line of business for Xfinity Home,” said Daniel Herscovici, senior VP and general manager of Xfinity Home, writing on the company Comcast Voices blog right after Comcast closed on iControl in March. “With it, [Comcast will] continue to provide the underlying platform that powers home security and automation services to a number of leading MSOs Icontrol was already serving around the world, including in Australia, Canada and Japan. We will also be able to offer wholesale services to new customers, either domestic or international. We have plans to make a more formal announcement about this new line of business soon.”