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.
A Parks Associates report finds that makers of smart TVs and streaming media players (SMPs) are shifting strategies to focus on the user experience (UX) as device sales start to flatten out. Accord...
Parks Associates research finds that over 50 per cent of US broadband households that subscribed to an OTT video service within the past year indicate that the service trial played a key role in their...
Indeed, Apple TV trails Roku and Google for most-used streaming devices, according to research firm Parks Associates, while it is almost neck and neck with Amazon's Fire devices. By offering lower-pri...
The smart home market is young, but it's growing rapidly as IoT makes its way into virtually every product that can benefit from some level of connectivity. Smart home device ownership in the United S...
