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

Survey Says: The Future of Smart Homes and Appliances Has Arrived

According to researchers at Harvard University, Americans spent nearly $420 billion on home improvements and repairs in 2020, as households modified living spaces for work, school, and leisure in resp...

2021 Predictions: ‘Zoom Rooms,’ Full Metal Jackets will shape the year

Twenty-six percent of US broadband households find the idea of making purchases directly from TV shows “appealing or very appealing,” according to a 2020 Parks Associates survey. From the article "...

Comcast, Walmart in talks to develop and distribute smart TVs

Comcast is fairly late to the game in distribution of streaming apps. Roku and Amazon together have a roughly 70% share of the U.S. market for streaming-media devices, with Apple in third place, accor...

Is The Increasingly Crowded Streaming Marketplace Going to Turn Consumers Back to Piracy?

In the short term, consumers are more than happy to keep paying for multiple services. According to a report published by Parks Associates in June 2021, 46 percent of US homes with broadband-level Int...