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

OTA-TV Climbing In U.S. Broadband Homes

Per the study, 81% of U.S. broadband homes still have a pay TV subscription, but only one-third of them are “very satisfied” with the service. Notably, 31% of U.S. broadband homes take multiple OTT se...

Voice Recognition Technology Hears Whispers Of M&A

More recently with Siri from Apple, Cortana from Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT), Google Assistant from Alphabet (NASDAQ:GOOGL) (NASDAQ:GOOG) and Alexa from Amazon (NASDAQ:AMZN) we've seen voice recognition t...

Mobile Video Viewing Spiked 55% from 2015-2017, Research Group Says

The shift has come, Parks said, as consumers watch less live video on traditional TVs—60% of all video watching took place on TVs in 2012 vs. just 44% at the end of 2017. Parks’ report is somewhat...

5% of Broadband Users Likely to Cut the Cord in the Next 12 Months

"Many are satisfied with their current provider overall, but these subscribers are aware of the other options available to them and could become actual cord-cutters if their current service does not c...