As part of Roku’s “Streaming Stick” outreach, their team offered up interviews with CEO Anthony Wood. While we chose to pass on the opportunity, our pals over at GigaOm were more aggressive with their coverage… and dug up a few interesting nuggets in speaking to Wood (who you might recall created the ReplayTV DVR).
First, the Streaming Stick may land in the $50 – $100 price range — which is where we find the current stand alone Roku boxes. Further, the UI is said to be the same as what’s found on those very same boxes. Yet it’s not clear to me if this merely represents parity between the devices or that Roku is sticking with their existing simplistic presentation.
But what’s most interesting is GigaOm’s dive into Roku sales. The company had anticipated moving 3 million units by the end of the year. However, Roku ended up with about 2.5 million deployed boxes – despite a massive (and sometimes befuddling) advertising campaign and the introduction of a low priced $50 mass market streamer. As to why? From GigaOm, Wood:
cited Netflix’s fall stumbles as one reason that sales may have been below its goals.
Some context makes this even more interesting… in that Wood was a Netflix VP and the original video streaming box was spun out of Netflix to Roku along with both financial and personnel investment. And now, several years and many “channels” later, it appears Roku’s fate is still intrinsically linked to Netflix. Something any potential suitor should take into account.