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 is still ahead of Amazon Fire TV in the U.S. streaming player market, according to May 2018 figures from Parks Associates. And Roku is taking advantage of that through the launch of its own ad-su...
Not only are consumers saying video aggregators are simple to navigate across, but they also value having a single bill for all their apps. OTT bundling is a key source of revenue for pay TV and other...
“Pay-TV providers want to retain subscribers, so they want to make sure that you stay inside their ecosystem,” says Brett Sappington, a media analyst at Parks Associates. “If you don’t have a reason t...
Using its OTT Video Market Tracker tool, Parks Associates has found that the number of OTT services in the United States has reached nearly 300. The firm said the total is more than double the amou...
