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

Parks: Live-Streamed Video Consumption Increases to 40% Among Internet Households

New data from Parks Associates found that 40% of internet households live-streamed content over the past 90 days. The Dallas-based research firm found that live-streamed video consumption reached near...

Coming in 2022: A big leap in smart home technology

Most consumers haven't caught IoT fever yet. "New research from Parks Associates indicates that just 36% of US broadband households have one smart home device, a percentage that decreases if all house...

Speed bumps on the way to smart cities

Data security concerns are still the top hurdle to the adoption of initiatives involving connected devices, including smart-city deployments, per 451 Research. According to research released this w...

It's Really Hard to Make Money With Virtual Reality Games

Considering the high profile of the launch we're talking about 2,300 is an awfully low number, even factoring in some of the criticisms of Light Repair Team #4 and its sparse marketing. That speaks to...