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

TV Becomes a Growth Channel for Commerce

“Streaming video and connected TV in particular absolutely tend to outperform linear TV,” said Michael Goodman, a senior contributing analyst with Parks Associates, a Dallas-based market research...

OpenAI Eyes AI Agent Phone, Kuo Says

“OpenAI is not a hardware company and must prove its phone performs well against the competition in terms of memory, camera quality, size, weight, screen responsiveness — all of that can be a chal...

The Smart Money: The Evolution of Residential Access Control

According to Parks Associates’ research, ownership of smart door locks reached approximately 11% of U.S. internet households in Q2 2025, and smart garage door openers have reached the same adoption le...

Sports fans face increasingly steep fees and piecemeal access to watch their favorite teams. The government wants to step in

Some 43 percent of U.S. households with Internet access watch sports, and 70 percent use a streaming platform, according to a 2025 by market research firm Parks Associates. From the article, "Sport...