Roku has been a buyer in recent years as its builds up its platform, advertising and content businesses, and the company expects more M&A within the streaming video industry.
CFO Steve Louden, speaking Thursday during the Citi AppsEconomy conference, said there will probably be fewer apps over time on Roku and in the TV ecosystem, and that it could translate into opportunities for Roku on the content and advertising sides either through partnerships or acquisitions.
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“For us, I think the good news is when we look out there and we say, how does the value proposition look and what are we working on internally in terms of the product roadmap, there’s no glaring holes but there is a lot of opportunistic partnership or acquisition opportunities,” said Louden, noting that some of Roku’s acquisitions like dataxu and the Quibi content library have still been “relatively minor” since a lot of Roku’s growth still comes through organic investment. “But I do think there’s more opportunity for us. We’re obviously very dialed into the ecosystem so we’re talking to a lot of people.”
Louden said the number of apps shrinking could be of particular benefit to the Roku Channel, which he said has an advantage over other free, ad-supported streaming TV services since it has access to Roku users’ unique IDs. That allows the company to see what content specific users are watching, improve content recommendation algorithms and potentially increase CPMs.
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Earlier this week, Roku again claimed the top spot among smart TV platforms being sold in the U.S. Louden said that his company’s market share has risen to the mid- to upper-30% range but has declined slightly in the past two quarters due to supply chain disruptions have impacted some of Roku’s TV OEM partners.
With the U.S. market practically cornered, Roku has increasingly turned its attention globally. Louden said that COVID has restrained Roku’s ability to expand its footprint into new international markets, but he said the company has seen “good progress” in the international markets where it has already launched.
“We’ve been gaining share in Canada, we’ve been gaining share in Mexico and Brazil and some of our other international markets,” he said. “Internationally, we’re primarily focused on driving scale initially and there’s only a few of our international markets that are far enough along where we’re actually starting to think about the monetization side.”
Roku launched in Germany in the fall of 2021 but so far is only selling Roku players in that market.