Roku may well be the most familiar streaming OTT device to consumers, thanks in large part to an aggressive retail strategy. But Roku is also now turning their attention to service provider partnerships to help place Roku devices in consumer homes. At Telecompetitor’s recent broadbandTV event, Roku vice president for pay TV, Andrew Ferrone outlined Roku’s service provider partnerships for streaming and OTT.
“The first thing we’re seeing is just an incredible growth in streaming, I mean Roku alone streamed over 3 billion hours of content last year, up from 1.7 billion in 2013,” said Ferrone in an interview (below). “So consumers have really embraced streaming and operators have come to realize that and we partner with operators in a number of ways.”
Ferrone highlighted the Time Warner Cable app which now is accessible through Roku, providing a comparable set-top-box experience for Time Warner Cable subscribers. DISH’s Sling offer is another example cited.
In this emerging streaming world, search and discovery as well as streamlined billing are critical success factors, noted Ferrone.
“Another one of the opportunities and challenges really is the billing relationships, right, we have this explosion in content sources, we’ve got Netflix and Hulu and Pandora and CBS All Access, you’ve now got consumers managing multiple bills from multiple content partners,” said Ferrone. “So Roku provides billing services to our content partners to really reduce the friction of customer acquisition and also help consumers more easily manage their subscriptions from one place.”
