If you bought a connected TV devices in the first quarter of this year, it seems there was a good chance it was a Roku-related device.
Strategy Analytics recently released its latest ‘USA Connected TV Device Vendor Market Share’ report and the headline aspect is how Roku-powered smart TVs and media streaming players accounted for thirty percent of the total number of connected TV devices sold in the US during Q1 2019.
Thanks to the greatest market share, not only was Roku the leading force in this respect, but it was by some margin. For example, the same report highlights the “second most sold streaming TV platform in Q1 2019” was Amazon’s Fire TV OS with a twelve percent market share.
In spite of being second and considered the main competition to Roku, Fire OS was only fractionally ahead of Samsung’s Tizen platform which accounted for eleven percent of sales in the same quarter.
Android TV on the other hand, is proving to be less than adequate competition in this space. Even when the figures for Android TV devices sales were combined with Chromecast sales (the report groups these two together under the one “Google” platform banner), the total market share for both came in at just nine percent.
What’s more, it would seem Strategy Analytics does not expect much to change with Android TV in the coming months. As the same report also makes various predictions on how the connected TV device sale market will perform during the second, third and fourth quarters of this year. As part of those predictions (shown in the image below), Android TV appears to be stagnant with only a very marginal sales increase over the first quarter.
This is in contrast to Roku which is predicted to continue to see impressive sales growth as the rest of the 2019 quarters unfold.
To be fair to Android TV, the report indicates coping with the growth of Roku is an issue all of the major TV streaming platforms will have to contend with. For example, the report expects that by the close of the year, the lead Roku will have over the other platforms “will stretch to seventy percent.” In other words, by the end of 2019 Roku is predicted to double its lead considering the report credits the current lead over the next major platform to be at thirty-six percent.
To put a real-terms spin on these figures, the report suggests there are currently “41 million Roku-based devices in use” in the U.S. By the end of this year, that number is expected to climb to 52 million.
If that tally is reached, then Strategy Analytics states Roku will single-handedly account for “eighteen percent of all connected media devices” in the U.S. This also likely means Roku can expect the number of users the platform has to increase, accordingly.
Although, this is something Roku does not have an issue with at the moment following the expansion of the platform beyond its hardware devices. A move that has led to massive revenue growth opportunities considering the platform revenue now routinely outperforms device revenue.