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.
It would also open another front in a competitive streaming platform battle that pits Amazon's Fire TV against Roku Inc. , Google (Nasdaq: GOOG)'s Android TV and Apple TV (tvOS), as well as smart TV-f...
Leading entertainment research firm Parks Associates reports approximately one-third of pay-TV subscribers in U.S. broadband households changed their pay-TV services between 1Q 2017 and 1Q 2018. Fifte...
Turning the new Chromecast into a fully fledged Android TV device could also be an important retail addition as Google attempts to cut into the streaming platform lead of Roku (36.9 million active acc...
And 55 percent of families with broadband say voice control is “appealing,” thus “driving adoption and usage of voice control devices and apps.” In fact as we head into the 2018 holiday season, 43 per...
