One of the secrets of Roku's success has been its expansion beyond its roots as a set top box maker (a term the company tries to avoid). To do this, Roku CEO Anthony Wood built a loyal customer following by moving the company away from only selling its own boxes, instead now licensing its software to TV makers, so they can ship screens with the company's streaming TV platform built-in. This is a much higher margin business than selling streaming hardware, and almost one-third of so-called smart TVs sold last year included Roku's software.
Roku has also developed and licensed streaming programming of its own, backed by advertising. The Roku Channel, available on all its platforms, was 2019's most popular ad-backed streaming channel, ahead of rivals Pluto TV and Crackle, according to market research firm Parks Associates. That's another business that yields higher margins than producing set top boxes.
From the article "Wall Street isn’t sure Roku can lead cord cutters to the promised land" by Aaron Pressman.
TiVo’s operating system is already in use in Europe, but it faces stiff competition in the U.S. Data shared by Parks Associates in November shows that Amazon, Roku, and Samsung account for 65% of all...
In December, Parks Associates announced that its research project Home Services Dashboard has revealed that ARPU for traditional services bundled with home internet increased year-over-year in 3Q 2024...
“We couldn’t get it going, actually, at our house for some reason,” said Elizabeth Parks, president and chief marketing officer at market research firm Parks Associates. She was one of many viewers...
Whatever the business model is, it's working. Data from ComScore indicates that Roku controls an industry-leading 37% of the United States over-the-top (non-cable) connected-television advertising mar...
