Roku Is Small But Mighty in Streaming Wars
The $5 billion business is holding its own against Amazon and Apple the way companies in other industries pray they can.
LIttle Roku is the biggest thing around.
Photographer: Patrick T. Fallon/Bloomberg
You’ve heard a lot about video streaming lately. Chances are you probably do a fair amount of it as well—whether on Netflix, Hulu, HBO or some other app. But there’s one company at the center of our binge-watching, cable-cord-cutting culture whose name tends to get lost in the mix, and that’s Roku Inc. It is small but mighty.
Viewers streamed more than five billion hours of TV and movies in the second quarter, enough to watch all the “Star Wars” films to date 245 million times. Roku took the largest share of those viewing hours among all connected-TV platforms, mobile devices and computers, according to a report by Conviva, which measures streaming audiences: