Roku is swiftly becoming among the most volatile stocks in the Cheddar 50. Shares of the streaming-device maker were down 26 percent last week, shaken by announcements from Facebook and Comcast that they were offering new streaming products as the pace of cord-cutting in the U.S. intensifies. Still, Roku shares remain up more than 250 percent year-to-date.
It is amid that shakeup that Roku on Monday announced a new partnership with the marketing platform Innovid to provide more in-depth measurements of OTT audiences.
Scott Rosenberg, senior vice president of Roku's platform business, made the announcement on Cheddar. He told Cheddar's Michelle Castillo that the "first-to-market" partnership "is designed to help brands plan, and better migrate their spending into streaming."
Despite streaming video taking up more of a share of "TV time" in U.S. households ー 30 percent of time spent watching video content on television is now happening via an OTT service rather than a traditional cable box ー just 3 percent of brands' advertising budgets is being spent on streaming.
That's because the analytics and measurement technology is still in its infancy compared to the Nielsen ratings that measure traditional TV audiences. Roku is hoping, with the Innovid deal, to help bring more data to brands who may want to increase spending on streaming but aren't sure who and how many people they are reaching, Rosenberg said.
Eventually, streaming ads will be able to merge the "sight, sound, and motion" of traditional TV commercials with digital innovations like interactivity, precise measurability, and targeting, he said.
In its most recent annual report on cord-cutting, Roku predicted that streaming TV viewers could surpass traditional pay TV viewers in five years. And given that most OTT households pay for at least one service, like Netflix or Hulu, the ad-supported streaming model is going to become a bigger part of the TV diet of many viewers, Rosenberg said. He noted that 75 percent of Roku customers already watch at least one ad-supported service on the Roku platform.
"This is a pretty clear indicator that the value proposition of watching something for free in exchange for being exposed to ads is a sound proposition," he said. "Even in this new world."
An independent watchdog within the IRS reports that while taxpayer services have vastly improved, the agency is still too slow to resolve identity theft cases. And National Taxpayer Advocate Erin Collins says those delays are “unconscionable.” Erin M. Collins said in the report released Wednesday that overall the 2024 filing season went smoothly, though IRS delays in resolving identity theft victim assistance cases are worsening. It took nearly 19 months to resolve self-reported identity theft cases as of January, and Wednesday's report states that now it takes 22 months to resolve these cases.
Amazon.com Inc. surpassed $2 trillion in market value for the first time in afternoon trading on Wednesday. The push higher for Amazon’s stock market valuation comes a little more than a week after Nvidia hit $3 trillion and briefly became the most valuable company on Wall Street. Nvidia’s chips are used to power many AI application and its valuation has soared as a result. Amazon has also been making big investments in AI as global interest has grown in the technology. Most of the company’s focus has been on business-focused products.
Climate change doesn’t just mean more extreme weather – it also leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity, tourism, and stresses infrastructure.
It’s an annual tradition: the Fed’s banking ‘stress test.’ A year after the regional banking crisis, there are good reasons to make sure they’re prepped.
Summer is upon us, which means weddings, trips overseas, and trips to see Taylor Swift. Avoid a “Cruel Summer” with these budget-friendly tips and tricks.
While Nvidia's meteoric rise led it to briefly dethrone Microsoft as the world's biggest public company, there's a lot more going on in this market than A.I.
