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

Analyst: 52% US households dual pay-TV/SVoD

According to the latest Market Snapshot: OTT and Pay TV: Partnerships and Competition, from research and consulting firm Parks Associates, which examines competition in the US entertainment marketplac...

User experience key focus for smart TVs and SMPs

A Parks Associates report finds that makers of smart TVs and streaming media players (SMPs) are shifting strategies to focus on the user experience (UX) as device sales start to flatten out. Accord...

Over 70% of TV viewing by young not TV or live-streaming

TV-viewing research from Parks Associates finds that live TV viewing among all video consumption has continued to decline overall among US broadband households – nearly 60 per cent of video viewed on...

Research: 6% US homes will have pay-TV OTT in 12 months

New research from analyst firm Parks Associates shows that 6 per cent of US broadband households are highly likely to subscribe to an online pay-TV service within the next 12 months, which would more...