The Roku Internet TV player
Take-Three: can start-up Roku possibly succeed with the Netflix Player where Apple failed miserably with its TV set-top box?
And this, inspite of Apple’s huge video collection on its online iTune store: over 30,000 TV episodes and over 2,500 films including 600 in high definition.
“We’re the leading seller of Internet TV player in the market”, boasts Anthony Wood, the Roku CEO.
The success of the Roku box is a combination of a rock bottom price ($99 vs $229 for Apple), more and more available content from Netflix (15,000) and soon from others, an attractive subscription-based business model (and soon free content from Hulu and the likes) and a simple product that just works!
Roku is located in Saratoga, Calif., and the Netflix Player is shipped direclt from China to a small warehouse in Santa Cruz, Calif., next to a “Goodwill” store!
“Netflix polled its users about the Netflix Player and we got 4 1/2 stars out of 5… no one complains about the box”, jokes Wood.
Huge sales expected for Christmas. No impact from the new $450 LG/Netflix Blu-Ray appliance
In my conversation a couple weeks ago, Wood said it expected a huge amount of sale this Christmas, probably after heavy promotions from Netflix and other video content partners that will have their own channels on the Internet TV player. Those channels will be created with the free software development kit (SDK) that the start-up company is expected to release before year’s end.
However, “open” does not necessarily mean open source like it was reported elsewhere. And Roku has no plan to go the extra mile. “We plan to open the platform for folks who want to use our SDK to create channels. Different than going open source”, confirms Roku’s vice-president of consumer products, Tim Twerdahl.
Today, Netflix trimmed a bit its revenue oultook for its fourth-quarter, now from $353 million to $359 million and said it expects to end that quarter with 8.95 million to 9.25 million subscribers, down from its July estimate of 9.1 million to 9.7 million.
Not a bad time to open the Roku box to other video content providers like Hulu, Amazon, etc.
Here’s an excerpt of my conversation with Wood:
So many possibilities…..What about the possibility of one of the cable news channels (MSNBC?) joining the streaming world 24/7 with Roku? It would just expand their audience and many of us (who have dumped our cable) miss one thing more than anything: a news channel (!!!) that’s always there (not having to rely on clips from the website).
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