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.
According to a report released July, Parks Associates found that 59 percent of U.S. broadband households subscribe to Netflix, Amazon, or Hulu. Netflix’s deals with pay TV companies helped it surpa...
The market research firm Parks Associates estimates that as many as 16 million North American households will have smart-home security by 2021, compared with 10 million forecast for traditional securi...
The hottest smart-home purchase this holiday season is likely to be a smart video doorbell. As many as 14% of U.S. households with broadband access say they're pretty likely to buy the device that...
According to an analysis produced by Parks Associates, about one-third of internet users stream cable TV by using the login credentials of someone they don’t live with. The firm estimated that passwor...
