As part of Roku’s “Streaming Stick” outreach, their team offered up interviews with CEO Anthony Wood. While we chose to pass on the opportunity, our pals over at GigaOm were more aggressive with their coverage… and dug up a few interesting nuggets in speaking to Wood (who you might recall created the ReplayTV DVR).
First, the Streaming Stick may land in the $50 – $100 price range — which is where we find the current stand alone Roku boxes. Further, the UI is said to be the same as what’s found on those very same boxes. Yet it’s not clear to me if this merely represents parity between the devices or that Roku is sticking with their existing simplistic presentation.
But what’s most interesting is GigaOm’s dive into Roku sales. The company had anticipated moving 3 million units by the end of the year. However, Roku ended up with about 2.5 million deployed boxes – despite a massive (and sometimes befuddling) advertising campaign and the introduction of a low priced $50 mass market streamer. As to why? From GigaOm, Wood:
cited Netflix’s fall stumbles as one reason that sales may have been below its goals.
Some context makes this even more interesting… in that Wood was a Netflix VP and the original video streaming box was spun out of Netflix to Roku along with both financial and personnel investment. And now, several years and many “channels” later, it appears Roku’s fate is still intrinsically linked to Netflix. Something any potential suitor should take into account.
“it appears Roku’s fate is still intrinsically linked to Netflix. Something any potential suitor should take into account.”
Well, unless Apple can somehow con the content companies into doing something against their interests, that’s the Brave New OTT World we will continue to live in. Netflix is the only game in town, as the prime-time bandwidth charts show, and Netflix is small potatoes. Content is king.
We’re perpetually 18 months away from this, but yet we continue to live in a multicast world. Viva CableCARD. Viva. Viva.
(I really want a Qwikster streaming service. The mailman just stands there and sticks his finger into a special USPS port on the Roku, and voila, we’ve got a streaming Qwikster channel on the Roku.)
So the lower than expected sales have nothing to do with more and more TVs including the major Apps that people use? Netflix is the one reason that was mentioned?
i would think the inclusion in more Tvs would be a bigger reason than the 4% drop in subcribers that netflix had.
The growth of more apps in tvs was predictable and hopefully figured into their forecast. Reed Hastings (and his management team) handling the price increase and resultant backlash so incredibly poorly was not nearly so predictable ;).
I do think that Amazon has a shot at creating a serious Netflix competitor over time, but they’re adding content slowly and in particular streaming support just isn’t showing up on devices at the rate you’d want to see. Certainly nothing like the take rate on Netflix was. You have to wonder what the problem is…