Roku lost $24.2 million in the first six months of 2017 and has accumulated $244 million in losses during its history. Giant rivals can spend millions on moonshots that end up as failures, and the world may never know the exact financial toll of these endeavors. Roku, as a company going public, has no such margin of error.
But here’s what Roku has going for it. CEO Anthony Wood saw a few years ago that the market for streaming-TV devices like the Apple TV was limited, so he started to look for other ways to make money off the transition from traditional TV to over-the-top TV.
Several metrics back him up. Roku’s prospectus says players using its OS accounted for 48 percent of usage on TV-connected devices in late 2016. This year, according to Parks Associates, Roku rose to 37 percent of U.S. homes using broadband, up from 33 percent a year ago. And last month, Roku held a 39 percent share of U.S. connected TV users, rising above its deeper-pocketed rivals.
From the article "Roku IPO stands a fighting chance in a market hostile to tech offerings" by Kevin Kelleher.
One in five internet households report being “highly sensitive” to how TV content providers collect and use data about family members and their activities, according to the latest research from Parks...
Parks Associates, a market intelligence firm, claims that while connectivity is still in its infancy, it is moving along rather quickly. “We’re moving past the early adopter phase of connected cars,”...
Parks Associates says that as smartphones and tablets become the norm at most organizations, organizations are beginning to deploy wireless display technology in the workplace. “It used to be that...
40 million people are already driving cars with some connected features, most of them connecting through your smartphone. Plus, 64% of people who have a broadband connection at home want a built-in co...
