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

PeerLogix sees momentum from demand-side integration

TV audiences have fractured, with over half of US households streaming OTT content daily, according to recent Parks Associates research. Advertisers have followed suit, and 2016 marked the first year...

HomePod Gets Multi-Room Audio Chops With iOS 11.4

The addition of multiroom functionality for the HomePod advances Apple's strategy for the product, said Dina Abdelrazik, research analyst at Parks Associates. "Its market entry approach was to intr...

Amazon's DVR Scheme May Be Taking Shape

"Over the past 18 months and longer we've seen a renaissance in live content, and a lot of that content is moving online with consumer habits," said Brett Sappington, senior director of research at Pa...

E-Sports Pioneers Are Making It Up as They Go

Another reason e-sports has strong growth potential is that, unlike many other sports, whose fans may only be spectators, e-sports attracts video gamers, many of whom could become e-sports competitors...