Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

Wall Street isn’t sure Roku can lead cord cutters to the promised land

One of the secrets of Roku's success has been its expansion beyond its roots as a set top box maker (a term the company tries to avoid). To do this, Roku CEO Anthony Wood built a loyal customer following by moving the company away from only selling its own boxes, instead now licensing its software to TV makers, so they can ship screens with the company's streaming TV platform built-in. This is a much higher margin business than selling streaming hardware, and almost one-third of so-called smart TVs sold last year included Roku's software.

Roku has also developed and licensed streaming programming of its own, backed by advertising. The Roku Channel, available on all its platforms, was 2019's most popular ad-backed streaming channel, ahead of rivals Pluto TV and Crackle, according to market research firm Parks Associates. That's another business that yields higher margins than producing set top boxes.

From the article "Wall Street isn’t sure Roku can lead cord cutters to the promised land" by Aaron Pressman.

Previously In The News

Comcast, Walmart in talks to develop and distribute smart TVs

Comcast is fairly late to the game in distribution of streaming apps. Roku and Amazon together have a roughly 70% share of the U.S. market for streaming-media devices, with Apple in third place, accor...

How many video devices do you have? About seven, survey finds

According to Parks Associates, nearly 40 percent of U.S. broadband households are watching multiple streaming services like Netflix, Amazon Prime and Hulu on those devices. With high numbers of str...

Study: IoT Users May Become Comfortable With Sharing Device Data, For A Price

A Parks Associates study has found that over a quarter of respondents would become more comfortable sharing their data if their devices would "automatically register for warranties and check warranty...

Report: Pay-TV Subscriptions to Drop 27% by 2024; Streaming Apps to Pick Up the Slack

Pay-TV services are showing their age as subscribership continues to fall, leading to a projected 76.7 million subscriber decrease by 2024, according to a report by Parks Associates. This drop wou...