Providing Market Intelligence for 40 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

Energy Bundled Services In Homes

The number of homes with BOTH broadband and solar PV doubled in the last two years as the number of broadband households that have adopted rooftop solar PV panels grew to 4 percent cross nation by the...

AT&T-Time Warner Deal: A Good Merger In The New Media Era Or A Bad Remake?

Pay-TV operators are seeing a "slow erosion of the core business," analyst Brett Sappington at Parks Associates said. "After years of attempts to be more than just a 'dumb pipe,' pay-TV operators h...

More People Listen To Music On Smartphones Than Make Calls, Study Finds

US-based market researcher, Parks Associates, in its study said that 68 percent of smartphone owners in the US listen to music via streaming outlets on a daily basis. The company also found, on a...

ONLINE VIDEO ROUND UP: Univision and Facebook Live, Amazon Chime, Comcast Announces XFinity Stream and More

Market research and consulting company Parks Associates' 360 View: Digital Media & Connected Consumers report that claims that 29 per cent of US broadband households get most of their news from social...