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

Save Time and Money with DIY Home Security

There's a burgeoning market for DIY home security products, thanks to advances in smart tech and more robust, easy-to-install offerings from home security manufacturers. According to market research f...

Cord nevers don't know what they're missing, and pay TV needs to show them, says Parks' Sappington

Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Parks Associates, kicked off the first annual Pay TV Show detailing some of the emerging challenges and opportunities for the pay TV space. He broke...

vMVPD market shakeout won’t happen in 2018, analysts say

The group, however, didn’t bite, forming a consensus that these are the early days for the virtual MVPD industry. Despite rampant competition for subscribers, high programming costs and loss-leader pr...

Editor’s Corner—How far can Amazon reach into pay TV?

Parks Associates’ Brett Sappington said during the Pay TV Show, an event produced by Fierce parent company Questex, that Amazon is the only company to get a la carte TV right. On top of that, he said...