I grew up thinking that paying for a product meant getting the product. A laptop came with its features. A car came with its hardware. A printer was still a threat, but at least it was a unique threat.
I noticed the change when my subscriptions stopped being primarily media and started to be tied to physical things. It was one thing to pay for movies, music, or cloud storage every month. It was another thing to watch the same logic spread to gadgets, cars, fitness equipment and smart home devices that already came with a price tag.
Then came stories like the smart bed that lost some of its functionality during an AWS outage. That’s when the whole model stopped feeling modern and started feeling crazy. More and more products now come with an asterisk: Pay for the hardware and then again for the features, remote access, cloud backup, AI tools or premium controls that make the whole thing seem complete.
This is what ownership looks like now
The smart home should take a back seat. Instead, it’s starting to resemble a legacy media company with better hardware and clearer branding. The screen on the wall, the speaker on the counter and the dashboard that connects everything are no longer just pieces of hardware. They influence what appears first, what feels smooth, and what quietly disappears from view.
Once the screen is in front of almost everything else, it is no longer a neutral surface. According to Parks Associates, 61% of U.S. internet households use a smart TV as their primary streaming device. Roku said in January 2025 that it had exceeded 90 million streaming households and was in nearly half of all broadband homes in the United States. Google announced at the end of 2024 that Google TV and Android TV combined would reach 270 million monthly active devices.
The interface is the new gatekeeper
The real argument in the smart home is no longer about the device that is on the shelf. It’s above the software layer that decides what gets seen first, what gets recommended, and what services are allowed to feel native. This is also where much of the ongoing monetization takes place. The hardware can be sold once, but access, visibility and premium features can be monetized again and again.
European broadcasters made this point unusually forcefully in March, calling on regulators to treat smart TV platforms and virtual assistants from Google, Amazon, Apple and Samsung as potential gatekeepers under the EU’s toughest technology rules. Your complaint wasn’t really about shiny hardware. It was about access, discovery, and whether people could move between services without being steered back into a company’s ecosystem.
Cable didn’t win because the box was magical. It won because it controlled access.
Convenience is very important here
The smart home still sells itself on the same old promise: less friction, less clutter, less hassle. Say the word, tap the screen, and let the system do the rest. This sounds great until convenience seems like gentle coercion. The easiest option is often the one that is already tied to the platform owner’s services, default settings, recommendations, or paid extras.
That’s the trick. A system does not need to lock every door to narrow down the selection. It’s just a matter of making one path feel seamless and the others feel slightly annoying. It can leave the basic version available while alerting users to the version with the subscription, add-on, or deeper integration. After a while, people stop voting and start drifting. What initially looks neutral turns out to be anything but different.
There will be soft fees
Cable has perfected a simple model: Own the box in the middle, package convenience as a service, and quietly dictate what viewers find, pay for, and stick with. The smart home revives this logic with cleaner hardware and better fonts. The box is now a TV operating system, a voice assistant or a home dashboard. The middleman has just learned to smile.
I can understand paying for software, cloud storage, or services that really cost money to run. What I’m less willing to accept is the idea that hardware I’ve already paid for should continue to require approvals, upgrades, and recurring credits. The smart home was sold as seamless. More and more of this just feels like a very polite way of charging twice.
When all the major players are pushing in the same direction, convenience starts to act like blinders on a horse. This keeps my eyes focused forward on simplicity and speed, while the creeping subscription, loss of choice, and steady capture of my data and attention simply stays out of my sight. Regulators can decide later how much of it should have been allowed. In the meantime, I have the privilege of paying a premium to unlock the best version of the hardware I’ve already purchased.
