Providing Market Intelligence for 40 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

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...

The Internet Isn't Yet Ready for the Video Explosion

As more streaming services have become available, the demands on the existing Internet infrastructure have increased exponentially. In 2016, another 27 new subscription-based video streaming platforms...

Netflix Leads the Top-10 Subscription OTT Video Services

HBO Now leaped into the top-five for the first time, YouTube Red solidified itself into the top-10 for the first time, and both Showtime and Starz moved up or entered the list compared to 2016. "Wh...

Why Steve Jobs' Grand Vision for a Breakthrough Apple Product Remains Unfulfilled

While the HomePod is new and the actual speaker appears to be of a much higher fidelity than its rivals, it's not a game-changer. "Apple is in a position that they haven't often been in over the pa...