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

Samsung debuts smart home device

In addition, the device's interoperability will be important. According to a recent study by Parks Associates and reported in Retail Dive, 75% of consumers who plan to buy a smart home device believe...

Alexa-Cortana voice integration speaks its first words

Another study from Parks Associates said almost 75% of consumers who plan to buy a smart home device said it was essential that it connect seamlessly to other products in their home electronics networ...

In Spain, Winter Is Coming with the Launch of HBO España

But what makes Spain unique in Western Europe is that about half of households have broadband but not pay TV, one of the highest internet-only household rates in Europe, according to research firm Par...

7-Eleven rolls out Apple Pay, Google Pay to all US stores

Mobile payment apps have gotten off to a slow start and there have been conflicting analyses of their market potential. For instance, customer use of digital wallets stalled in the past year because t...