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.
Roku faces myriad competitors, but it still dominated the U.S. streaming device market with a 37% share as of early 2018, according to Parks Associates. Amazon ranked second with a 28% share, and Appl...
The Roku Channel is also turning heads. The company's ad-supported channel was named one of the three best ad-based over-the-top services among U.S. broadband households according to Parks Associates,...
Roku (NASDAQ:ROKU) went public on Sep. 28, its stock surging nearly 70% from its IPO price of $14 per share. The stock hit almost $30 the following day, but subsequently pulled back to the low $20s....
“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...
