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.
The self-improvement industry is a promising one, accounting for more than $10 billion in annual sales. Over 40 million smartphone users in the U.S. actively use at least one wellness or fitness track...
Dealers have a tremendous opportunity to benefit from smart home technology as consumers have started to take an interest in it — with more than half of the population excited about the technology, ac...
Even among U.S. households with broadband service, newly released market research from Parks Associates found that less than 30 percent of respondents were familiar with where to buy smart-home produc...
For movie and TV studios, the big bugaboo is people illegally copying or downloading their IP. For SVOD services, it’s another form of piracy – password sharing, which cost companies $500 million worl...
