Nearly 40 million households are using Roku devices, making it the second-most popular streaming TV device for binge-watchers and cord-cutters alike.
Last week, the company released its Q4 2019 earnings report that beat Wall Street estimates, with the company reporting revenue of $411.2 million — well ahead of the $391.6 million that analysts expected.
More than 4 million households activated new Roku accounts in Q4, likely fueled by aggressive pricing during the Christmas holiday season and new streaming TV services rolled out by Disney and, to a smaller extent, Apple.
“We have now entered the streaming decade when we believe consumers around the world will choose streaming as their primary way of viewing TV,” a company executive wrote in a letter to shareholders last week. “We believe that we are well positioned to thrive in this new decade based on our increasing brand strength, the scale of our growing active account base, our purpose-built TV streaming operating system (OS) and first party customer relationships with growing engagement.”
The company was able to weather a few storms brought in the quarter, including two major content providers — AT&T and Fox — pulling their apps from the platform. AT&T TV remains unavailable to Roku users; the company eventually reached a deal with Fox just days before the network aired Super Bowl LIV.
Roku entered the market more than a decade ago with streaming hardware built by Netgear and other partners that gave users access to Netflix, Hulu, Crackle and others via a robust channel store. In recent years, the company shifted away from a revenue model based on hardware toward one focused on advertising and customer viewing data.
The company has been neck-and-neck with Amazon, the maker of the Fire TV line of hardware, for overall household adoption. More than 40 million households use Fire TV devices to access streaming services, the retailer said last year.
