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.
Are you a fan of horror movies? Anime? Arthouse? British dramas? Whatever your off-the-beaten-path obsession is, there’s a subscription video service just for people like you out there. Parks Assoc...
Google’s Chromecast streaming-TV device didn’t lose ground, but given that it’s only utilized as a streaming TV device by 17% of streaming video viewers — despite launching in 2013 with considerably l...
There were 221 active over-the-top (OTT) services in the US in 2018, up from 199 in 2017, per Parks Associates. And this figure is slated to increase as Disney, WarnerMedia, NBCUniversal, launch their...
Despite all the convenience features of modern smartwatches, for users it’s still all about fitness, according to recently released data from Parks Associates. The research firm says that tracking...
