*By Britt Terrell*
Roku, the leading provider of over-the-top hardware, has shifted its focus from selling TV boxes to providing access to streaming content through its platform on others' devices.
The company is happy to trade the margins it makes on selling OTT hardware for growing its users, said Steve Louden, Roku's chief financial officer.
"We focus on two things: driving active account growth ー that's the scale of the platform ー and then monetizing the platform," Louden said in an interview Wednesday with Cheddar. "Players are important to us, but they are just one of three ways we grow active accounts," he added.
Roku sells players to plug into TVs; it licenses its platform to TV manufacturers, and licenses its operating system to streaming and telecommunications companies like Sky in Britain and Telstra in Australia.
Hardware sales are becoming less important to the company's bottom line, Louden said, and focus has shifted to its platform business, which has more potential users. The company has 21 million active users, most of them in the U.S., and the company is looking to grow internationally. It's already in 23 countries.
"Roku historically has been primarily focused on being and maintaining our leadership position as the number one streaming platform in the U.S.," Louden said. "But increasingly we are looking to the international markets as well."
For the full interview, [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/roku-cfo-talks-stock-performance-and-national-streaming-day).
The next time you get a call about an upcoming medical appointment you may not be talking to a human. Hospitals are increasingly using AI assistants.
Schools are turning to AI-powered surveillance technology to monitor students on school-issued devices like laptops and tablets. But there are risks.
Hours after a series of outages that left X unavailable to thousands of users, Elon Musk is claiming that the social media platform is being targeted in a “massive cyberattack." Musk said on a post Monday that the attacker is either a large, coordinated group or a country. Complaints about outages spiked Monday at 6 a.m. Eastern and again at 10 a.m, with more than 40,000 users reporting no access to the platform, according to the tracking website Downdetector.com. A sustained outage appeared to begin just after noon Eastern.
The World Video Game Hall of Fame has revealed its 12 finalists for 2025. Members of the public have a week to vote for their favorites online.
An insider account being billed as an “explosive” memoir about “seven critical years” at Facebook/Meta will be published next week.
Extinction is still forever. But scientists at a biotech company are trying what they say is the next best thing to restoring ancient beasts.
The typically tight-lipped CIA is peeling back the curtain on some of its secrets with an upcoming presentation at South By Southwest festival.
Melania Trump says it’s “heartbreaking” to see teens grapple with the fallout after they’re targeted by malicious and sexually explicit online content.
A woman is suspected in a string of vandalism against a Colorado Tesla dealership that included Molotov cocktails thrown at vehicles.
Microsoft is closing down Skype, the video-calling service it bought for $8.5 billion in 2011.
