What They Say
Business Insider reports that Roku is exploring the feasibility of making its own brand of smartTVs and apparently ran a focus group. Someone told the blog:
“They showed different models, feature sets and names, sizes, price points,”
The report also said that others confirmed that the idea has been ‘on the company roadmap for more than a year’. Subscriber growth has been slowing, although active accounts rose to 56.4 million in its third quarter and up 23% year on year.
What We Think
Hat-tip to Jon Peddie for spotting this story!
It wouldn’t be surprising if Roku was looking at this. One of its key users in the US is TCL which has also developed Google TVs, although it has hit some software issues with that platform (TCL Google TVs Pulled from Shelves in the US Due to Software Issues) It’s hard to see, given the slim pickings in TV hardware, why Roku would want to go this way, although it must be seeing a significant impact on its dongle business as SmartTVs become ‘good enough’ based on their internal processors. (BR)
