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.
Parks Associates analyst Brett Sappington agreed that it will be compelling for some customers, particularly due to content that won’t be available elsewhere like MLS games and some of the college spo...
Loyalty is the name of the game for places like Netflix and Hulu going forward, Callahan says. “It’s much easier to keep a customer than acquire a new one,” he explains. High turnover has been one...
The benefit is that you can cancel any time you want, and are only committed on a month-to-month basis. This might serve as a good move for Amazon, allowing people to dip their toes into the Prime wat...
Netflix has by far the most loyal subscribers of its competitors, according to new research by Parks Associates. Analysts found that Netflix subscribers were much less likely to cancel than those o...
