Narrative: Disrupting TV
Each narrative page (like this) has a page describing and evaluating the narrative, followed by all the posts on the site tagged with that narrative. Scroll down beyond the introduction to see the posts.
Discovery, Viacom, AMC, A&E, and Scripps Working on Sports-Free Bundle (Sep 12, 2017)
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Amazon’s Next Fire TV Hardware Leaks, Will Have Alexa Support Even When TV is Off (Sep 11, 2017)
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Amazon Shifts Original Content Efforts to High End Drama with Global Appeal (Sep 11, 2017)
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Facebook Willing to Spend $1 Billion on Video Content by End of 2018 (Sep 8, 2017)
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Disney Says Streaming Service Coming in Late 2019, Will Include Lucasfilm & Marvel (Sep 7, 2017)
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Spotify and Apple Make Video Content Hires (Sep 6, 2017)
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Roku Launches its Own Channel Showing Ad-Supported Movies (Sep 6, 2017)
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★ Roku Files to Go Public, Loses Money, Sees Ads as Core of Future Business Model (Sep 1, 2017)
Roku today made public its S-1 filing with the SEC as the first step towards a long-awaited IPO. I’ve been tweeting charts and nuggets from the filing for the last couple of hours in this thread, but I’ll provide a brief summary here. The long and the short of it is that Roku is growing at a decent clip, is currently unprofitable with little sign of that changing, and is in the midst of a big shift in its business model. Whereas for most of its history selling its streaming boxes has been its core revenue stream, it’s recently added a platform licensing business, but that’s not actually where its new revenue streams are coming from. Rather, it licenses its platform very cheaply and monetizes usage by taking a cut of certain subscriptions sold through its platform and serving up ads. It’s the latter which is a surprisingly important part of its business model (though there have been signs of this shift) and which is a major focus of much of the text in the S-1 filing. Last year, this advertising and subscription revenue share was nearly $50 million out of its $400 million in total revenue, and half of its platform revenue, and that accounted for essentially all of its growth in 2016. In that sense, though Roku on paper looks like principally a hardware company, it’s in some ways more like a Facebook or a Google – a company that collects millions of data points on its customers (18TB of uncompressed data per day) and will use that to target advertising. In that sense, Roku is an unusual player in the streaming space, given how many modern streaming services eschew advertising, but sees itself as a key beneficiary of the move of TV advertising dollars from traditional channels to streaming. This is going to be a fascinating IPO to watch and I’ll have plenty more analysis on Roku in the next few days.
Spotify Reins in Original Video Push, Refocuses on Music-Related Content (Aug 31, 2017)
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Disney/ABC TV to Cut Staff to Reduce Costs (Aug 31, 2017)
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