Providing market intelligence for more than 35 years

In The News

DirecTV is making an Android-powered streaming box. What gives?

“If (AT&T) had a box that came in at $35 or under, consumers would be interested,” Brett Sappington told me. He’s the senior director of research at Parks Associates, which pays extremely close attention to the over-the-top (OTT) — meaning Internet-based TV — space. “They’d buy it just to see if it worked.”

Sappington reasons that a new streaming box isn’t dead on arrival, so long as it has a stellar user interface, is feature-rich, is open to all TV app developers and is relatively cheap. An existing DirecTV Now customer, for instance, may be compelled to test out the company’s box if it promises better streaming performance — say, no buffering during any live streams — and comes with some sort of service-plus-box deal.

From the article "DirecTV is making an Android-powered streaming box. What gives?" by Jennifer Van Grove.

Previously In The News

Netflix, Amazon, Hulu Leading In OTT Subscriptions, Finds Parks

The researchers at Parks Associates have come up with a tally of the most popular over-the-top (OTT) video services as ranked by the number of subscribers. While the numbers are estimates from the fir...

15% of Pay TV Customers Downgraded Service in the Last Year

According to the researchers at Parks Associates, 15 percent of all pay TV subscribers in the U.S. with broadband connectivity downgraded to a less expensive service in the last year. Also, 34 percent...

Roku is Making TV Speakers, But They Only Work with Roku TVS

The idea behind this is that if your TV sounds better, people will stream more, which is the metric Roku cares most about, Klarke says. Roku likes to say that it's the US's number one streaming conten...

SmartThings Bundling Hubs In Effort To Play Up Smart Home Use Cases, Not Products

The independent home automation hub is fading as a means to a do-it-yourself smart home purchase, Robert Parker, SmartThings senior vice president-engineering, told us after his keynote at the Parks’...