Roku Joins Netflix In Halting Report Of Streaming Household Numbers

Lauren Myers October 31st, 2024 - 11:01 PM

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Wall Street’s expectations for Roku’s third quarter have been exceeded. Additionally, the firm declared that starting in Q1 2025, it will no longer provide quarterly updates on the number of streaming households and average income per user.

“Since our IPO in 2017, the streaming industry has evolved meaningfully, with Americans now spending significantly more TV time streaming than watching cable,” the company said via The Hollywood Reporter. “Our business has also grown and evolved, and we are now primarily focused on growing platform revenue and profitability.”

This action is similar to Netflix’s, which also established the same deadline this year. In the past few years, there have been many different reports.

The Hollywood Reporter details Roku’s total net revenue reached $1.062 billion, up 16% year-over-year, a first for the company. The company also recorded a gross profit of $480 million and a net loss of 6 cents per share for the third quarter. Analysts had hypothesized revenue of around $1.02 billion and a loss per share of 32 cents.

Roku anticipated $1.01B in sales, $440M in gross profit and $45M in adjusted EBITDA (Earnings Before Interest, Taxes, Depreciation, and Amortization), according to The Hollywood Reporter. An additional 2 million homes added Roku streaming to their lineup, totaling 85.5 million. Streaming hours reached 32 billion, a 20 percent increase from the previous year.Roku reported $41.10 in average revenue per user, which was unchanged from the previous year.

This steadiness “reflects an increasing share of Streaming Households in international markets, where we are currently focused on scale and engagement,” the business wrote in a letter to shareholders via The Hollywood Reporter. According to Roku, this displays nations’ different phases of monetization.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Roku’s platform revenue increased by 15% year-over-year to $908 million in the third quarter. Due to increases in subscription prices, streaming service distribution grew faster than platform revenue as a whole. Roku credited this success to improvements in the functionality of the home screen, a growth in Roku-billed subscriptions and a greater demand for advertising due to deeper third-party integrations.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, executives claim the Roku Channel ranks third among the platform’s apps in terms of both devices and reach. Anthony Wood, the CEO of Roku, has pondered extending the Roku Channel to other devices to increase user engagement but stressed that it offers greater benefits when used on its platform.

“If you just look at the economics of that business, it’s much more economical, and much more profitable when it’s on our platform versus the third-party platform,” Wood stated via The Hollywood Reporter.

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Roku’s CFO Dan Jedda added that the company does not plan to increase costs on its original content as it is variable-based and attached to revenue sharing.

“Original content isn’t a significant investment for us in terms of cost. And while we will absolutely continue to invest in this content because our streamers love it, it’s not a material portion of our overall cost structure within The Roku Channel, ” Jedda said, according to The Hollywood Reporter.