With no new streaming video player in two and a half years, Apple (NASDAQ:AAPL) is losing ground in the market. Apple's set-top box, Apple TV, slipped to fourth place in U.S. sales of streaming media devices last year, research firm Parks Associates reported Thursday.
Roku continues to lead in streaming media device sales, accounting for 34% of units sold in 2014. Google (NASDAQ:GOOGL) was second with 23%. Amazon.com (NASDAQ:AMZN) overtook Apple for third place. Amazon grabbed 16% of the market, compared with 13% for Apple.
Together the top four brands accounted for 86% of all streaming media devices sold to U.S. broadband households in 2014, Parks said.
"The market consolidation around these four brands forces new entrants to develop more creative features and functionality to tap into the strong consumer demand for streaming content," Parks analyst Barbara Kraus said in a statement. "Devices with additional functionality such as the Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) Compute Stick may be a sign of things to come, where streaming is not the primary function but an extra feature to provide additional value."
From the article "Apple TV Falls Behind In Streaming Device Market" by Patrick Seitz.
However, that's not the most noteworthy detail of the Parks Associates report for Charter and Comcast shareholders. Curiously, only about one-fifth of those internet users questioned subscribe to a st...
Things have changed. Parks Associates analysis in 2014 found that Chromecast had replaced Apple TV in second place behind Roku. Its market share was 20%. In 2019, though, Parks Associates found that o...
Pay-TV operators are seeing a "slow erosion of the core business," analyst Brett Sappington at Parks Associates said. "After years of attempts to be more than just a 'dumb pipe,' pay-TV operators h...
“There seemed to be an attitude around the industry that after House of Cards and Orange is the New Black, there was no way Netflix could catch lightning in a bottle again,” says Glenn Hower, a senior...
