SmartThings' new hub supports 200 sensors and switches, video monitoring, has 10 hour battery backup, goes on sale today for $99
SmartThings' new hub uses Samsung cameras to monitor your home — SmartThings, the open-platform smart home company that sold itself to Samsung a year ago …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year after selling itself to Samsung, SmartThings is shipping its first Samsung-era hub: $99, support for 200 sensors and switches, video monitoring built on Samsung cameras, and a 10-hour battery backup. It lands months after Samsung [[a:825142|updated the SmartThings Hub and unveiled an April 2015 subscription home-monitoring service]] — the hardware is now clearly being positioned as the entry point to that recurring-revenue layer.
The hub is also becoming Samsung's connective tissue across product lines: within weeks of this launch Samsung announced it would embed SmartThings hubs in its 2016 HD TVs (hubs inside the TV itself), and by 2017 the same platform sat underneath a $550 ADT co-branded security bundle.
First-order effects
- Buyers get a materially cheaper on-ramp to SmartThings than the earlier generation — $99 buys 200-device capacity plus camera-based video monitoring that previously required separate gear.
- The hub's launch cadence now tracks Samsung's subscription push: the April 2015 monitoring service needs installed base, and a low-priced hub is how it gets one.
Second-order effects
- The ADT partnership shows where the platform economics point: once a cheap hub seeds homes, the monetization moves upmarket into $550 professionally-branded security bundles.
- Camera makers and accessory vendors gain a distribution channel through SmartThings' open platform — a pattern Samsung formalized years later with its own $89.99 SmartThings Cam and companion plug and bulb.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the hub itself commoditizes — Samsung already folded it into TVs and later into a Plume-powered WiFi router — while value concentrates in subscriptions, cameras, and the sensor ecosystem around the platform.
- Open smart-home platforms increasingly consolidate under large appliance and consumer-electronics owners, since only they can subsidize hub hardware across TVs, routers, and appliances to win the installed base.
The trend: The smart-home hub is shifting from a standalone profit product to a subsidized gateway whose returns come from monitoring subscriptions, cameras, and ecosystem lock-in.