Roku had just under 37 million active accounts at the close of 2019. The hardware and platform company confirmed the results as part of its latest earnings report, highlighting its continued and sustained growth every quarter.
As the streaming market has evolved, so has Roku and to the point where it is now a seriously major player in the industry. It was only three months ago that the company announced it had 32 million subscribers. The latest results point to almost five million more being added in the time in between.
Officially, Roku states it had 36.9 million active accounts by the end of last year. Although that only paints part of the ever-growing Roku picture. For example, the company also confirmed that almost one in three smart TVs sold in the U.S., were Roku TVs. All of which helped the company to 40.3 billion streaming hours during 2019 – a year-over-year increase of 16.3 billion hours.
Roku in a dominant position, but it’s not alone
Although the increases in accounts, active users, number of hours streamed, and devices sold keep coming, Roku is not alone in this sense. Amazon’s Fire TV platform appears to be doing just as well as Roku and possibly even better. For example, by January 6 of this year, Amazon was already announcing more than 40 million monthly active users. Although the announcements have come at different times they relate to almost the same period and show Fire TV just ahead of Roku.
Besides Roku and Fire TV, the rest of the market continues to be lagging. Android TV is slowing making waves and there is the expectation that it could eventually lead the market completely, thanks to its approach of going after providers and operators instead of consumers. In the meantime, it looks like the battle will continue on between Fire TV and Roku until the next quarter results are announced.
In fact, the next batch of quarterlies may prove interesting considering Roku has encountered a few hurdles during the last couple of months. These have included pre-Super Bowl drama, the loss of AT&T TV and AT&T TV NOW, and the current issue where some of its players do not appear to be compatible with Netflix autoplay previews disabling.
Source: Roku
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