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

Can Traditional TV Keep Up In A Digital-First World?

The ongoing disruption was made manifest in the number of consumers tuning into alternate channels: 63% of broadband-enabled households have at least one OTT subscription, according to research from P...

Smart TVs: Today’s center of video aggregation and opportunity —Industry Voices: Erickson

Smart TVs are viewed as must-have devices by an increasing number of US homes, and they are the only streaming video product category to have risen in adoption continuously throughout the pandemic. Ho...

Voice shopping in retail expected to grow to $40 billion by 2022

While home speakers, as well as the use of AI assistants on smartphones and tablets, figure centrally into the voice shopping market, there is also great potential in the automobile market. A study by...

Report: Pay-TV Subscriptions to Drop 27% by 2024; Streaming Apps to Pick Up the Slack

Pay-TV services are showing their age as subscribership continues to fall, leading to a projected 76.7 million subscriber decrease by 2024, according to a report by Parks Associates. This drop wou...