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NOTE REGARDING FORWARD-LOOKING STATEMENTS
This Annual Report on Form 10-K contains forward-looking statements within the meaning of Section 27A of the Securities Act of 1933, as amended, or the Securities Act, and Section 21E of the Securities Exchange Act of 1934, as amended, or the Exchange Act, about us and our industry that involve substantial risks and uncertainties. All statements other than statements of historical facts contained in this report, including statements regarding our future results of operations and financial condition, business strategy and plans and objectives of management for future operations, are forward-looking statements. In some cases, forward-looking statements may be identified by words such as “anticipate,” “believe,” “continue,” “could,” “design,” “estimate,” “expect,” “intend,” “may,” “plan,” “potentially,” “predict,” “project,” “should,” “will” or the negative of these terms or other similar expressions.
Forward-looking statements are based on our management’s beliefs and assumptions and on information currently available to our management. These forward-looking statements are subject to a number of known and unknown risks, uncertainties and assumptions, including risks described in the section titled “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in this Form 10-K, regarding, among other things:
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our financial performance, including our revenue, cost of revenue, operating expenses and our ability to attain and sustain profitability; |
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our ability to attract and retain active accounts and increase hours streamed; |
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our ability to attract and retain advertisers; |
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our ability to attract and retain additional TV brands and service operators to license our platform; |
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our ability to license popular content on our platform, including the renewals of our existing agreements with content publishers; |
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changes in consumer viewing habits or the growth of TV streaming; |
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the growth of our relevant markets, including the growth in advertising spend on TV streaming platforms, and our ability to successfully grow our business in those markets; |
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our ability to adapt to changing market conditions and technological developments, including with respect to developing integrations with our platform partners; |
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our ability to develop and launch new streaming devices and provide ancillary services and support; |
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our ability to compete effectively with existing competitors and new market entrants; |
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our ability to successfully manage domestic and international expansion; |
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our ability to attract and retain qualified employees and key personnel; |
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our ability to mitigate the risks of harm associated with security breaches and system failures; |
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our ability to maintain, protect and enhance our intellectual property; and |
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our ability to stay in compliance with laws and regulations that currently apply or may become applicable to our business both in the United States and internationally. |
We caution you that the foregoing list may not contain all of the forward-looking statements made in this Annual Report on Form 10-K.
Other sections of this report may include additional factors that could harm our business and financial performance. Moreover, we operate in a very competitive and rapidly changing environment. New risk factors emerge from time to time, and it is not possible for our management to predict all risk factors nor can we assess the impact of all factors on our business or the extent to which any factor, or combination of factors, may cause actual results to differ from those contained in, or implied by, any forward-looking statements.
You should not rely upon forward-looking statements as predictions of future events. We cannot assure you that the events and circumstances reflected in the forward-looking statements will be achieved or occur. Although we believe that the expectations reflected in the forward-looking statements are reasonable, we cannot guarantee future results, levels of activity, performance or achievements. Except as required by law, we undertake no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements for any reason after the date of this report or to conform these statements to actual results or to changes in our expectations. You should read this Annual Report on Form 10-K and the documents that we reference in this Annual Report on Form 10-K and have filed as exhibits to this report with the understanding that our actual future results, levels of activity, performance and achievements may be materially different from what we expect. We qualify all of our forward-looking statements by these cautionary statements.
Investors and others should note that we may announce material business and financial information to our investors using our investor relations website (ir.roku.com/investor-relations), SEC filings, webcasts, press releases, and conference calls. We use these mediums, including our website, to communicate with our members and public about our company, our products, and other issues. It is possible that the information that we make available may be deemed to be material information. We therefore encourage investors and others interested in our company to review the information that we make available on our website.
Item 1: Business
Overview
Roku pioneered streaming to the TV. Roku connects users to the streaming content they love, enables content publishers to build and monetize large audiences, and provides advertisers with unique capabilities to engage consumers. We do this at scale. As of December 31, 2017, we had 19.3 million active accounts1 and during 2017 our users streamed 14.8 billion hours 2on the Roku platform. TV streaming’s disruptive content distribution model is shifting billions of dollars of economic value. Roku is capitalizing on this large economic opportunity as a leading TV streaming platform for users, content publishers and advertisers.
Consumers win with TV streaming—they get a better user experience, more entertainment options and more control over what they spend on content. When users want to enjoy streaming entertainment, they start at the Roku home screen where we put users first by helping them find the content they want to watch. From our home screen, users can easily search, discover and access over 500,000 movies and TV episodes in the United States, as well as live sports, music, news and more. Users can also compare the price of content from various channels available on our platform and choose from ad-supported, subscription, and transactional video on-demand content. The Roku platform delivers a significant expansion in consumer choice. Consumers can personalize their content selection with cable TV replacement offerings and other streaming services that suit their budget and needs. Ad-supported channels available on the Roku platform include YouTube, CBS News, Crackle, The CW and Vice; subscription channels include HBO Now, Hulu and Netflix as well as traditional pay TV replacement services like DirecTV Now, Sling TV, Spectrum TV and Sony PlayStation Vue; and transactional channels include Amazon Video, Google Play and Vudu. Consumers are increasingly streaming ad-supported content.
Roku operates the number one TV streaming platform in the United States as measured by total hours streamed, according to a survey that we commissioned, conducted in the fourth quarter of 2017, by Kantar Millward Brown. Content publishers and advertisers win with Roku because our large and growing user base simplifies their access to the fragmented and complex over the top, or OTT, market and we provide them with direct to consumer engagement and monetization opportunities. We provide our content publishers with access to the most engaged OTT audience, as measured by average hours streamed, and the ability to monetize their content with advertising, subscription or transactional business models. Furthermore, as a pure play, neutral TV streaming platform, we are better able to serve content publishers compared to other platforms that have diversified business operations and competitive content offerings. Advertisers on our platform can reach our desirable OTT audience with ads that are more relevant, interactive and measurable than advertising delivered on traditional linear TV. As traditional TV audiences shrink, OTT audiences have become increasingly important to advertisers who must continue to reach large audiences. Our growth in active accounts and hours streamed has attracted more content publishers and advertisers to our TV streaming platform creating a better user experience.
While we currently generate a majority of our revenue from sales of our streaming players, we generate a majority of our gross profit from our platform revenue. Our business model is to grow gross profit by increasing the number of active accounts and growing average revenue per user, or ARPU which we believe represents the inherent value of our business. We define ARPU as our platform revenue during the preceding four quarters divided by the average of the number of active accounts at the end of that period and the end of the prior four quarters. We grow new accounts through three primary channels: we sell streaming players, we partner with TV brands through our Roku TV licensing program, and we have licensing relationships with service operators. The fastest growing source of new accounts comes from our licensing partner relationships which accounted for 48% of new accounts in 2017, up from 42% in 2016. We believe we have a significant opportunity to grow platform revenue and as we further monetize TV streaming hours we will increase ARPU, which was $13.78 per active user during the year ended December 31, 2017 up by 48% as compared to $9.28 per active user for the year ended December 31, 2016. Our success in growing ARPU will depend on our ability to increasingly generate platform revenue from content publishers and advertisers as we increase the number of active accounts.
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Active accounts represent distinct user accounts that have streamed content on our platform in the last 30 days of the period. |
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Streaming hours streamed as the aggregate amount of time users streamed content on our platform in a given period. |
Our Products
Advertising
Our advertising products enable advertisers to serve relevant ads to our users and measure return on investment. We collect a variety of information on the Roku streaming platform, including user registration data, as well as anonymized information like audience engagement with channels on our platform, use of features like search and interactions with advertisements. With Roku TVs, we have the ability to use automatic content recognition (ACR) and other technology to collect information about what users watch via antennae and devices connected to Roku TVs, and we collect data about the use of the Roku TV’s on-screen programming guide.
We gather this information and then create user segments, develop look-a-like audience and predictive models, and activate segments for use in a variety of business operations including recommendations for users and analytics for content publishers and advertisers. Our platform also provides a mechanism to match and ingest third party data sets from our advertisers and data vendors who may have demographic or other attributes that would enhance our analytics, products or advertising efforts.
We continue to refine measurement capabilities on our advertising platform. Through our own measurement tools and third parties including Nielsen, Acxiom, Oracle Data Cloud, Nielsen Catalina Solutions, Experian, Placed and Kantar Millward Brown, we provide advertisers the capability to measure audience demographics, validate ad effectiveness, and quantify sales lift from advertising on Roku. We offer engagement analytics such as impressions, click-through rates and video completion rates. We also work with a wide variety of third-party measurement companies to measure the branding impact of the ads we serve. We have also recently established relationships with third party providers that focus on transactional or point of sale data, which enables our advertisers to compare the effectiveness of Roku ads.