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.
By the end of 2020, there will be 17.2 million 5G consumer market subscriptions worldwide, concentrated in the US, Japan, South Korea, China, Australia, and major industrial nations in Western Europe,...
“It’s no surprise that the tech giants like Google, Amazon and Samsung have moved into this product category,” says Brad Russell, research director at consulting company Parks Associates. “Home networ...
But it's obvious that Roku is feeling the heat from Amazon's aggressive push in the TV streaming (and smart TV) market. According to research from Parks Associates, Roku had the lead in streaming medi...
There are many glowing predictions regarding the smart home, and the wider IoT industry, but a Gartner report predicted only last year that 21 billion IoT endpoints will be in use by 2020, which will...
