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.
Amid IoT ecosystem platforms, Nest from Nest Labs (subsidiary of Alphabet Inc.) is a mature and well known brand. It was acquired by Google (now Alphabet) in 2014 for $3.2 billion and has expanding it...
You might think the generation that regards traditional television with something approaching open disdain would be unwavering in their loyal to the SVODs and OTTs that stream their beloved content an...
Parks Associates will host the 19th-annual CONNECTIONS connected home conference on May 19-21, 2015, at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport. CONNECTIONS focuses on technology and business solut...
At the beginning of 2018, Bloomberg noted that consumer demand for smart thermostats will steadily increase over the next five years, so we know the devices that have already been effective aren't goi...
