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

Epix Enters the Direct-to-Consumer Streaming Fray

Though Epix is trying to take advantage of this trend as a portion of consumers self-bundle with video, the challenge will be to ensure that Epix is part of that bundle. A recent study from Parks Asso...

Disney+ Could Blow Away Subscriber Forecasts

Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, agrees that Disney+ has the best shot at being wildly successful, and that securing fewer than 23 million Disney+ subs globally by 20...

‘Game of Thrones’ series finale is approaching. How will HBO survive after it?

Brett Sappington, senior director at the research firm Parks Associates in Addison, Texas, said another positive sign is how HBO Now subscriptions continued to grow in 2017 — after “Game of Thrones” f...

New Route to New Revenue: Detect & Respond to Credentials Sharing

Credentials sharing is not a new problem for service providers. As the OTT and pay-TV landscapes continue to evolve to accommodate entertainment on multiple devices, credentials sharing has followed s...