Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROKU) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript

Roku, Inc. (NASDAQ:ROKU) Q4 2024 Earnings Call Transcript February 13, 2025

Roku, Inc. beats earnings expectations. Reported EPS is $-0.24423, expectations were $-0.41.

Operator: Welcome to the Roku Fourth Quarter 2024 Earnings Conference Call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers’ presentation, there will be a question and answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message by saying your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded. I would now like to hand the conference over to your speaker today, Conrad Grodd, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead. Welcome to Roku’s fourth quarter and year ended 2024 earnings call.

Conrad Grodd: On today’s call are Anthony Wood, Roku’s Founder and CEO, Dan Jedda, our CFO, Charlie Collier, President, and Mustafa Ozgen, President devices. Our full results and additional management commentary are available in our shareholder letter on our IR website at roku.com/investor. On this call, we will make forward-looking statements which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter and periodic SEC filings for risk factors that could cause our actual results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements. We will also present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in our shareholder letter. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2023 period. Beginning this quarter, we will forgo prepared remarks and go straight into Q&A. Operator, our first question, please.

Q&A Session

Operator: Thank you. Our first question comes from the line of Shyam Patil with Susquehanna International Group. Your line is now open.

Shyam Patil: Hey, guys. Congrats on the strong results. I had a couple of questions. I guess the first one, you know, very strong fourth quarter. You know, what drove the outperformance? And do you guys expect that to continue in 2025? And then second question, on free cash flow conversion, how should we expect that to trend in 2025 and beyond? Thank you, guys.

Anthony Wood: Hi, Shyam. This is Anthony. Thanks for the question. We were very pleased with the Q4 results. It was an outstanding quarter. I feel like we are continuing to execute well. And I thought, you know, one of the interesting things about the quarter was just how it provided a lot of proof points that our strategy to grow our platform revenue is working and working well. Just to remind everyone, like, the three key points of our strategy to grow platform revenue. The first is to lean into making better use of our home screen. You know, our home screen on all our Roku devices is a key asset for us. You know, half of broadband households in the US start their TV viewing experience with our home screen. So leaning into making better use of the assets is a big part of our strategy to grow platform revenue.

The second part of it is to continue to drive more ad demand by expanding our third-party partnerships. That’s also going well. And then the third point is just to continue focusing on growing our subscription revenue with more focus on subscriptions generally, more resources focused on subscriptions, and more home screen integration. So, you know, I feel like our strategy is working well, and we are seeing that start to play out in the quarter. Looking at advertising, generally, I mean, advertising is also doing well. It did great the quarter. It was an outstanding advertising quarter as well. Even ex-political, it was a strong advertising quarter. Advertising picked up on many fronts. And one of our strategies around advertising is to continue to create more unique, high-demand, broad-reach ad units that are unique to our platform.

I want and just for example, one of those ad units is the video marquee ad on our home screen, and that’s also very popular. We are also in our ad business very good at reaching the right person with the right message at the right time. So it was an outstanding quarter. Executing well. Our strategy is working, and the strategy is going to continue to work. There’s still a lot of growth left in this business. This is still fairly early days in the streaming transition. I see continued growth in 2025, but let me turn it over to Dan. He can talk more about that part of your question.

Dan Jedda: Thanks, Anthony. Hi, Shyam. It’s Dan. So let me give a little bit of color on Q4 into 2025. You know, the Q4 was very strong. We grew 25% on the platform side. If you back out political, which had its six points of growth, we grew 19%. And if you look at our Q1 and what we are expecting, we are going to grow 16% on a year-over-year basis for flat in Q1. And for the full year, we are going to grow 12%. And if you back out political in 2025, we are going to grow 15%, which is actually faster than the growth in 2024. So to answer your question, we do expect some very strong results to continue into 2025. If I just take it down to platform gross margin, at the midpoint of our guide for 2025 at 52.5%, that compares to 53.5% in 2024.

So a 100 basis point decline, but that’s fully explained by 606 adjustments in 2024, which we do not expect. Any 606 adjustments, our platform margins are flat. So we expect to grow platform gross profit as much as platform revenue, ex-606. And then dropping to adjusted EBITDA, the $350 million guide would imply a 130 basis point improvement in EBITDA margins on a year-over-year basis for 2025. So, again, gaining very good leverage as we grow our platform revenue, as we manage our OPEX, and still continue to invest in our platform business. So all in all, very good. On to your last question on how to think about free cash flow conversion trend in 2025, thank you for that question. Free cash flow and free cash flow per share is our North Star metric.

We feel very good about free cash flow. We ended 2024 at just over $100 million of free cash flow. I’m actually expecting free cash flow to be higher than our adjusted EBITDA guide for 2025. We’ve got a lot of good things working on the working capital front. We will continue to be CapEx light in 2025, and so free cash flow should continue to grow and should grow faster than adjusted EBITDA for 2025. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Dan.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Morris with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is now open.

Michael Morris: Thank you. Good afternoon, guys. Two questions for me. One, just to follow-up on that last question. Could you expand on some of the drivers of the 16% platform revenue growth that you are looking for in the first quarter? You know, it’d be great to hear about how you are thinking about maybe advertising versus SSD, and it’d be great to hear also about how these third-party DSP partnerships are contributing and how you think about that throughout the year. And then secondly, could you share any updated thoughts on how this Walmart acquisition of VIZIO will impact your business? I think they are a pretty large retail partner of yours currently. So do you expect your products are going to be deemphasized or that there will be an impact on your business as a result of that combination?

Anthony Wood: Hey, Mike. This is Anthony. I’ll let Dan take your first question, and then after you finish that, I’ll take your second question about Walmart.

Dan Jedda: Hi, Mike. It’s Dan. Yeah. I’ll take that first question. With respect to the drivers of the 16% platform revenue growth in Q1, so that is both streaming service distribution and our advertising activities. Both are growing very strong in our Q1. We start to comp average price increases in the back half of 2025. So, you know, we’ll give more guidance on SSD going forward. But in Q1, both are driving excellent growth. We feel very good about the advertising business activities both for Q1 and for the full year. I would expect our advertising activities to actually grow faster than streaming services distribution, which we love to see. So all in all, again, very strong going into Q1. Very strong for the year, both SSD, that’s primarily from subscriptions and then, of course, our advertising activities, which we’ve talked a lot about in the shareholder letter and what’s driving them including, you know, the DSP partnerships, which I’ll turn it back to Anthony.

Anthony Wood: And then regarding your question about Walmart and the VIZIO acquisition, let me just make a few introductory remarks, and then I’ll actually turn it over to Mustafa who runs our device business, to talk more about it. You know, first of all, we’re doing a great job on growing our streaming households. I mean, we passed over 90 million streaming households globally in the quarter, we added over 4 million new streaming households in the last quarter alone. Our first-party TVs are also doing well. You know, we’ve sold over a million first-party TVs in 2024. And, you know, we announced, I think, last quarter that we expected to in the not too distant future, pass 100 million streaming households. We’re on track for that to happen.

So our streaming households are growing nicely, both inside the US and outside the US. Both parts are growing. You know, we’re aware that Walmart bought VIZIO, and that’s all taken into account in our forecast and our view of the future. And I fully expect, you know, that our streaming households are going to continue to grow, both inside the United States and outside the United States. Walmart’s an important partner for us. We do a lot of business together. I also expect that to continue. But let me turn it over to Mustafa who can provide more detail.

Mustafa Ozgen: Hi, Mike. This is Mustafa speaking. The Roku OS has been the number one selling TV OS in the US for six years in a row. For full year 2024, unit sales of Roku TVs were greater than the next two operating systems combined. And as Anthony mentioned earlier, we’ve surpassed half of broadband households in the US in terms of household penetration. And, you know, we’re a very large platform in terms of distribution and also in terms of ease install base. And, therefore, our streaming players and all of our Roku TVs have already a wide retail distribution. They are available in popular retailers such as Amazon, Best Buy, Sam’s Club, and Target. Also in other specialty and regional stores. So it’s a quite wide distribution.

And, you know, we continue to, you know, gain shelf space in the retailers as we introduce new products and, you know, upgrade our products. And, also, because our brand is very popular, customers love our brand. They trust our brand. They ask for Roku by name at stores. So, you know, retailers would love to carry our products. So overall, these are all, you know, the sort of the reasons why the retailers will continue to carry Roku products and, you know, as long as there’s demand, there will be basically a good shelf space allocated for our products. And I should also highlight that we distribute our operating systems to our customers in, you know, three different ways. One is with our streaming players, which is quite a large business. They’re with our third-party TVs. And, you know, recently with our first-party TVs, we have a large sort of different channels to distribute our operating systems.

So we’ll continue to do that. So we feel very confident that we are, you know, we are well-positioned to continue to grow in the US, also in other countries, and remain on track to achieve 100 million streaming household target in the coming years. Thank you.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Your line is now open.

Laura Martin: Hi there. Congratulations on fantastic results. Hey, Anthony. So about a year ago, I think it was. Hi. You fired everybody in subscription and had them all report to you. Then in the most recent quarter, you overdelivered popcorn by about $100 million versus off the consensus. Could you break out for us what did you get done in the subscription business in the year you just finished managing that business? And when you think about the roadmap, how much better or how much bigger of a contributor to subscription be going forward? And are they as big as what Charlie is doing over in retail media networks and self-service? Thank you.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Laura. Nice to hear from you. The connection wasn’t great. So I think I got your question. But if I don’t answer, let me know. I think you asked about our subscription business and we break up what we’ve been doing there in the last year. A little bit about the roadmap. And then I wasn’t quite sure what this is. Biggest retailer media business. So, you know, if we go back to our strategy for growing platform revenue, it’s leveraging our home screen more, growing ad demand, there’s a bunch of ways we’re doing that, but one of the biggest is working with third-party platforms and deeper integration there. And the third is growing our subscription business. We have a very large subscription business that’s tens of millions of subscribers that we bill on our platform.

And it’s both through what we call premium subscriptions, and also through direct-to-consumer subscriptions. All enabled by our billing platform, Roku Pay. And that business is a very good business for us. It continues to grow. And there’s a lot of items on the roadmap that we, you know, we don’t talk about that will continue to drive that business. We continue to add more partners. For example, we recently added Max to the premium subscription lineup. And, you know, we’ve also made changes internally around the way we handle operations and are organized to just give it more focus. You know, we’re very disciplined about our OpEx, but we’re allocating more of our OpEx to subscriptions than we used to. To speed up some of the changes in the roadmap, but we’ll continue to grow that business.

So, you know, I just got a lot of room to grow. And I’m very bullish on it. And then the last part of the question. No. So I think that answers your question. If not, let me know.

Laura Martin: Yeah. That was great. And my second one was just on local. I thought it was interesting that political was 6% of your fourth quarter revenue and Trade Desk said it was 5% of theirs. Would you say that’s a secular shift out of the local TV business and you would expect that to grow in every two-year cycle now? Have RT our people converted to using CTV in place of local broadcast? Political ads.

Anthony Wood: Well, I’ll turn it over to Charlie, but I’ll definitely, one of the drivers for us was just we spent more we put more effort into it. I mean, it’s an area that we’ve identified strategically as a big vertical for us that we want to get better and better at. And, you know, we did better than we did the last cycle. I’m sure we’ll get better at it the next cycle. That’s one of the drivers, but there are definitely secular shifts. I’ll let Charlie talk about it.

Charlie Collier: Yeah. Hey, Laura. How are you? You know, I would hope I would say this. You know, you learn so much from political advertising because it really is a good microcosm of what we do very, very well. You know, we talk about driving results for marketers and obviously, an election cycle is time-bound. They’re very specific with respect to their targets. And Roku does a really good job at delivering performance. So we’ve seen not just the growth but I like what it portends in terms of our thesis that we can be a performant platform at the highest level. So, yeah, I think there’ll be a continued shift to CTV. And Roku specifically because of how well we deliver for advertisers. And prove ROI.

Laura Martin: Thank you. Great numbers.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is now open.

Jason Helfstein: Thanks for taking the question. Hello, everybody. Clearly, the Roku channel is delivering tremendous usage growth. And giving you a lot of available ad units to sell. When you think about your success with political in the fourth quarter, did this crowd out other ad demand, or do you think that this was all incremental when you think about the inventory? So thank you.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Jason. This is Anthony. I’ll let Charlie take that question.

Charlie Collier: Sure. Hey, Jason. Look, you know, I think probably in the market, there were people who waited to get out of the political cycle to play some advertising. So I think advertisers were making that choice. For us, we have like you said, the Roku channel grew 82% year over year. We have a lot of inventory and that allows us to come to the market from a position of strength and really serve every part of demand on the demand curve and to service all types of pricing. So for us, I think the question to incrementality it’s tough to say. But as I said before, one thing I’m sure of is our ability to target improved performance was really evident during the political cycle and I think it served us well throughout the quarter and will continue to do so into 2025.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Condon with Citizens JMP. Your line is now open.

Matt Condon: Thank you so much for taking my questions. My first is just on the home screen monetization. Understood that you guys have talked about video ads being placed there and that was in beta. There’s no mention of it in the shareholder letter, so I just wanted to touch base on that and see how that’s progressed are the levers you guys have there to increase monetization. And then my second question is just on device revenue and gross profit margins. Understood, I think it was an increased discounting period during the holiday. It does seem like I had carried over into one Q. So I’m just wanting to make sure that there wasn’t any sort of increase competitive intensity in the quarter and into one Q. Thank you.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Matt. This is Anthony. I’ll let Charlie talk about video ads and just how that plays into overall ad strategy and then I’ll take your follow-on question about device margins. I will say, you know, the home just before I turn over to Charlie, you know, our strategy of making better use of our home screen is not just about putting a marquee video ad on the home screen, for example. Like, we are very careful about putting ads on our home screen, I mean, we’re very focused on both driving more monetization, but also driving increased customer satisfaction. You know, we have a very iconic home screen. Consumers love it. We, you know, we have no intention of breaking it. So putting video ads strategically in different locations on our home screen is part of it.

But also, for example, we added one row of content recommendations on our home screen. You know, that alone is driving significant more engagement in the Roku channel and also driving a lot of subscriptions as well. So that’s another example of, like, how do we use our home screen to drive more. But let me Charlie can talk about our ad strategy and how things like the marquee video ad fit into our overall strategy. And then you can turn Charlie, you can turn it back over to me and we’ll talk about device margins.

Charlie Collier: Sure, Anthony. Hey, Matt. Look. You know, Anthony’s right. The home screen is a proprietary asset, and it is doing very well in terms of demand for advertisers. You know, we call it the Roku experience. Everything that an advertiser can participate in inside the UI is considered part of the Roku experience. And we’ve been talking a lot to you guys about our demand diversification. And really over the last few quarters, we’ve diversified demand. And I believe the home screen placements are a big part of that. So the Roku experience advertising I mentioned in the letter were Pepsi and Neutrogena, but there were all sorts of advertisers who took advantage of not just the marquee video unit that Anthony mentioned, which now puts video on the home screen, but we view integrations that include shopability.

We have integrations where we build showcases where people can go in and, you know, look at the color of the car that we’re advertising. And it’s really impact driving and performance. Roku in the macro is living at the intersection of two of the fastest-growing segments in advertising, I would say. You know, commerce-driven solutions, which, again, our Roku experience units perform really well. And then just the move from linear to, you know, CTV and streaming. And so all of the unique products in the Roku experience and the integrations we do allow us to prove business results for our marketers. Not just M&E anymore, but marketers of every category. So it’s working really, really well. Anthony, do you want to take part two?

Anthony Wood: Yeah. So device revenue gross margin. So let me I’ll just repeat, like I said before, which is that we’re very happy with the progress we’re making on growing streaming households. Passed 90 million streaming households globally. We’re growing both in the US and internationally. In the US, we passed half of all broadband households. We had over 4 million streaming households in a quarter. We’re making great progress. I expect that growth to continue. We expect to continue to grow streaming households both in the US and outside the US. But in terms of your question about devices and gross margins, and revenue, let me turn that over to Dan.

Dan Jedda: Yeah. Thank you, Matt, for the questions. Dan here. So, you know, I think as you mentioned, like, during the holidays, the market had high expectations for unit sales, and from an overall market perspective, that did not materialize, and a lot of excess inventory across the market did drive pricing down, including at Roku. This did impact our revenue and our device gross profit for Q4. It led to an excess inventory position in Q4, which will impact Q1. It will carry over just the excess inventory. And basically, this is primarily in our first-party TV business. But for the full year, and so we do expect margins to come to rationalize to a more normal device margin level. That’s in our guide. So for the full year, we’re guiding to roughly flat dollars for device gross profit, relative to 2024, that’s on higher device revenue, so margins are improving. And our guide does factor in what we would expect from the market pricing going into this year.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Ralph Schackart with William Blair. Your line is now open.

Ralph Schackart: Good afternoon. Thanks for taking the question. On the call, I’ve talked a lot about the strength and strong ad performance in the quarter and sort of your outlook. And that advertising grew faster than overall platform revenue in Q4. Maybe if you could sort of segment, you know, the top one or two things that are going really right now. This is I’m sure there’s a bunch of things come together. Driving the strong performance, but just get a sense of, you know, what’s really driving the strong performance in that business, and then I’d follow-up, please.

Anthony Wood: I think, this is Anthony. You know, I mean, all three parts of our strategies group platform revenue are really working well. You know, we are making better use of our home screen to drive more engagement and to drive more subscription to drive more ad revenue. You know, there’s more I think there’s still a lot of room to grow there, but that’s going well. The, you know, integrations with third-party DSPs to drive more end demand, you know, those are going well. We’re continuing to work on that. We’re continuing to deepen those. Then subscriptions subscriptions is a good business for us, and it’s and, you know, it’s and it’s growing, both the premium subscriptions and the direct-to-consumer subscriptions. There’s just a lot of things to lot of product changes, product improvements, as well as, you know, partnership improvements, additional partners that are all driving that business.

So at a high level, that’s what I’m seeing. I don’t know Charlie or Dan, did you have anything to add? Or you got it?

Charlie Collier: Well, you’re absolutely right. Obviously, with all those areas. I’ll say one other thing we’re able to do is we really can come to the market from a position of strength because of the growth of our inventory. We have the volume, the competitive pricing, and the products at every price point on the demand curve. So you start to look at the way the market’s moving, and Roku is really well-positioned to optimize at the premium side of our inventory, you know, our sponsorships, our sports, our Roku City, and all of the premium inventory, and we can service all the way down the demand chain to folks who don’t need those signals or are willing to take a different inventory mix. So I very much like the fact that we are growing in this environment and have the kind of volume and competitive pricing flexibility and products at every point.

Ralph Schackart: Great. And then just quick follow-up for guessing for Dan. And in the letter, talked about, you know, wanting to provide a clear and accurate outlook based on latest info rather than conservatism. Just curious, have you has your approach to guidance changed since last call? Just kinda curious anything you could add on that, what’s in the letter. Thank you.

Dan Jedda: Yeah. It’s a good call out, Ralph. You know, what we’re trying to do is just provide not just Q1 this year, obviously, but full year and give the, you know, give the outside all the using all the data points we have. Obviously, the ad industry can be very choppy and volatile from quarter to quarter, but we’re providing our best view that we see for all of Q1 and for all of 2025. So, again, like, I think we’re just saying, hey. This is our view internally on what we see. For Q1 and for the full year, obviously, we’ll update everybody each quarter as we go through it. But it’s not a guide out there that we would say is overly conservative. It’s our view what we would expect for 2025.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Steve Cahall with Wells Fargo. Your line is now open.

Steve Cahall: Thank you. First, it’s on subscription. So we’ve seen some prices go up at some of the streamers, Netflix took price up recently. But they’re also guiding the flattish ARPU for the year. I think their expectation is that folks will down tier to the ad tier and we’ve seen ARPU be kinda flattish at some of the other big streamers. So I’m just wondering how that plays into your SSD revenue. If pricing goes up, but folks do end up on some of these lower subscription tiers, do you get the acceleration of the pricing? Does it flatten it out a little bit? So maybe you can just help us think about how some of these industry shifts towards ad-supported tiers that we’re seeing rolls through SSD. And then a couple follow-ups on political.

So just first, you know, given how big the cycles are getting, you know, this was a record cycle it seems like 2026 could be similar to 2024 from a cycle size. Are you adding Salesforce to try to build into political more and help the campaigns in the packs reach the younger audiences? And then lastly, Dan, sorry. I can’t help myself on this one, but it seems like you probably would’ve had a pretty good idea of political when you reported Q3 and then you’ve said that the guidance isn’t conservative. So maybe you can just help us understand how the political kinda came in as a surprise in Q4.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Steve. Thanks for the three questions. Sorry. On subscriptions, that’s okay. I’ll turn it over to Dan. I’ll just say that this, you know, not going into any specific. But, you know, as a general matter, our deals are structured to allow us to win when our partners win. So if we sign up subscriptions, if we grow their engagement, so, you know, there’s that often means Roku has some monetization based on subscription bills, but also based on advertising. So but that’s just kind of a general statement. But let me turn it over to Dan.

Dan Jedda: Yeah. Thanks, Steve. It’s Dan. And Anthony is exactly right. Like, the way to think about subscriptions is the way, you know, all our deals are different across the different content of our different partners. But ultimately, like, one of the ways I like to think about it is when they win and we’re gonna win on the economics of it. So as they go through and adjust their pricing to better reflect what’s best for them, it’s gonna flow through to us, you know, depending on the deal and the economics. And then I’ll I’m gonna take the third question, and then I’ll send it back to Anthony or Charlie on political, but the Q4 political did obviously surpass our expectations. Really was a very strong end of political cycle.

We did know that there was demand, giving all the uncertainty, going into, you know, the last month of political but it did surpass our expectations for Q4, and a lot of that is due to, you know, Charlie and team, and what they were able to do, and the political not just on the sales side, but really with, you know, amazing focus on what we can do with targeting. Political is very targeted. It’s very performance-driven. As Charlie said. And as Anthony said, we are just very focused on this. So I believe that this particular vertical will be a strength for us going forward. Q4 certainly showcased that. I’ll let Charlie talk about, or Anthony talk about the political cycle and how they’re thinking about it.

Anthony Wood: Well, yeah. Let me just say one thing then. I’ll turn it over to Charlie. This is Anthony. You know, political the other we were very focused on political as a vertical because we want to become good at it. And we knew there was a lot of opportunity there. It’s very difficult for us to forecast because we haven’t it’s not something we do every day. Something we don’t have a lot of history. It’s something that we’re improving our ability at. So it’s an area where, you know, forecasts are gonna be uncertain. So I think that was also a factor. But, Charlie, do you wanna?

Charlie Collier: There was also a candidate change, which changed the cadence in the middle of the election cycle. But in general, we did staff up. I’m really proud of the whole ad sales team and the political team, you know, has done a tremendous job. And then I think as the cycle built and as we are successful serving our clients, in this case, political clients, more money is coming to Roku because it’s performant. And I think that’s it’s a really good moment in time because it tests a lot of our skills. It shows us what we’re good at and where we need to be better, and yeah, we’ve already started talking about 2026 and even 2028. And how we’re going to prepare for it on the staffing side. Technology and all. But, you know, all signs were that we’re doing a lot of the right things and we still have room to grow.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Cameron McVeigh with Morgan Stanley. Your line is now open.

Cameron McVeigh: Hi. Thank you. Guys did a good job at slowing your OpEx growth rate recently. And when you think about your OpEx levels, particularly this year, curious where you see the most opportunity to become more efficient.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Cameron. This is Anthony. Let me I’ll just say I think that, you know, we are very focused on continuing to grow our investment in our platform business while also being very disciplined about our OpEx levels. And so, you know, areas to be more efficient, you know, part of this where do we hire employees? I mean, we have a lot of offices around the world. Some of them are in lower-cost regions, compared to, say, Silicon Valley, so that’s one strategy we’re using is to hire more employees in lower-cost regions. We’re also looking hard at automation. You know, we’ve really been the curve on our cloud cost, for example, by more resources into the software and writing more efficient software. Obviously, we’re looking at AI.

There’s lots of ways to improve efficiency both in operations and on our and the customer experience using AI. So and we spend a lot of time just talking about how to become more efficient, how to be more effective. And so just in general, it’s just a big focus for us. Execution in general is something we’re really focused on. I don’t know. Do you wanna talk about OpEx, Dan?

Dan Jedda: Well, the only thing I would add on that Anthony’s, of course, right, is that doing all what he said has allowed us to reallocate capital to the platform side of the business while not losing any focus on our critical growing of scale on the device side. So we feel very good about the investments that we’re making on the platform side to continue to grow our platform revenue. And we’re able to do it because of everything Anthony just said without adding a lot of external OpEx. So it’s really a balanced approach between operational discipline, but continuing to invest in the platform side of the business. Which, again, we all feel very good about.

Cameron McVeigh: Got it. Thank you. And then just secondly, curious how this response has been to the release of your self-serve ads manager. How are you thinking about the SMB opportunity both in terms of timing and magnitude going forward?

Anthony Wood: This is Anthony. I’ll I mean, the response has been great, and I think it’s a huge opportunity. I mean, it’s a very large market. It’s a very large market of advertisers that don’t traditionally buy TV advertising that we can tap into. So it’s something we’re gonna continue to invest in. But Charlie, I don’t I’ll let you comment.

Charlie Collier: Yeah. That’s absolutely right. And it fits with our strategy. You know, we’ve talked a lot about demand diversification. And the small and medium-sized businesses, it is incremental. And these are early days, but we like the trajectory and really gonna diversify our demand well beyond the top 500 advertisers, which is terrific.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rich Greenfield with Light Shed Partners. Your line is now open.

Rich Greenfield: Thank you for taking the question. This is sort of a one question, but sort of three parts. Humor me for a few. I’m curious how you think about the lifetime value in impact of a Roku active account subscriber who subscribed to at least one of these premium subscription offerings that you’re talking a lot about in both your letter and on the call earlier. It feels like once you’ve subscribed using Roku as your, you know, sort of how you subscribe, I would think that has a real lock-in effect. But I was wondering if there’s anything you’ve seen in terms of, you know, what happens to people getting different devices in the future or not being on active account and how it changes when they have at least one subscription tied to Roku.

And, you know, sort of the other side of it is what happens for the provider, whether it’s Max or any of your premium subscription partners, what if they do they see much lower churn when they work with Roku? I know some have seen higher churn with Amazon. I’m just curious sort of what the experience has been with Roku. And then lastly, just sort of tied into all of this is do you bundle these subscriptions over time and create your own packages of multiple of these or how do you see that changing over time? Thanks.

Anthony Wood: Hey, Rich. Thanks for your question. This is Anthony. Let’s see. So, you know, I would first of all, I can’t really comment on churn rates of different aspects of our business. I would just say that on that point, we’re very focused on lifetime value churn, customer experience, and I think we’re good at it. I think we understand it quite well. Obviously, we’re always trying to get better, but it’s a big area of, you know, data science team and analytics. Focused on our subscription business. We’re focused on growing both premium subscriptions and our direct-to-consumer subscriptions for our, you know, for our app partners. So we have teams working on both. We’re happy when we get a new subscriber, you know, no matter whether it’s a premium subscription or a direct-to-consumer subscription.

I would say they both are generally positive in terms of retention because they both use our Roku Pay billing system. And so it gets the consumer in the habit of using our billing system. They’ll have a method of payment on file. But, yeah, I think in general, we aspire to get a higher segment of our customers paying for subscriptions through Roku Pay and through our billing system. It’s an area I think of a bit it’s an area of big opportunity for us because, you know, I would say if you I mean, compared to some of our competitors, we’re actually a little bit behind on premium subscriptions. I mean, it’s a business for us, but it could be a lot bigger if you compare it to say where our competitors are versus other areas of our business where we’re well ahead.

Most areas of our business, we’re well ahead of our competitors. But this is one area where I think there’s opportunity that we’re sort of below where we should be and where we will be.

Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Alan Gould with Loop Capital. Your line is now open.

Alan Gould: Thanks for taking the question. I’ve got two. One, can you give us an update on what’s happening on your international expansion? And secondly, is M&E still a headwind, or are we past the tough comps there? Let me throw a third one in, Dan. Was there any 606 adjustment in the quarter? Thank you.

Anthony Wood: Yeah. Alan, thanks for that single three-part question. Let’s see. International expansion. This is Anthony. I mean, you know, we’re doing very pleased with our progress internationally. We’re making great progress. I mean, just to remind everyone, you know, the primary markets we’re focused on right now is the Americas, North America, Central America, Latin America, and the UK. Number one. We’re the number one streaming platform in Canada, Mexico, and obviously the US. We’re growing fast in Latin America generally. Our growth is starting to accelerate in the UK. So we’re making we’re making good progress in the markets we’re focused on. I would say great progress. You know, we and we do that the normal ways we’re focused on.

Lots of new Roku TV partners. We have new Roku TV partners in Brazil, Colombia, Chile, and Peru, for example. In the UK, we’re expanding the number of Roku TV partners as well as retail distribution partners. I would say, you know, internationally, in most markets, except for maybe Canada, we’re still focused primarily on the scale of streaming households and less so on monetization, but that, you know, that will come. And, you know, I think last quarter, we said we expect to reach 100 million streaming households in the next 12 to 18 months. We’re on track to do that. International is a big part of that. So it’s going well. Don’t know. Dan, do you want to add anything on international?

Dan Jedda: Yeah. Let me just I’ll just add a little bit to that. As Anthony said, like, we’re in different stages of our scale and monetization. Monetization on the international front. You know, he mentioned Canada. Where we are actually very focused on monetization. It’s growing very well. We’re actually hiring more locally in Canada even to double down in that area. In Mexico, we actually have scale. We’ve reached scale. You know, I think we’re over 40% of broadband penetration in Mexico. And we’re really now starting to turn our focus on monetization. We haven’t monetized in any meaningful way there because of the market. And now that we’ve got the scale, that is going to be a focus point for us going forward. And then in other countries like Brazil and what we’d call the rest of Latin America, we are in our growing scale phase.

And so we’re not actively, in any big way, monetizing those areas yet. But all this will come over time, and we would expect as both our scale continues to grow and as importantly as these markets move to digital advertising, that we’re going to be in a great position to take advantage of that, especially given our number one position in, like, Mexico and other kind areas of Latin America and South America. So it’ll take some time. I would that international revenue does become a more meaningful part of our net revenue over time as we continue to build these scale and ultimately get to the monetization side of the business. On M&E, I’ll

Anthony Wood: You want to take down any color?

Charlie Collier: Yeah. You know, M&E is something we’re really good at. We continue to improve the Roku experience units that I mentioned earlier. And, actually, we’ve diversified beyond M&E for those units from revenue from non-M&E brands supporting all those Roku experiences on the platform is healthy. We see a ton of advertisers coming in where it was just M&E before. Anthony mentioned the Roku I mean, the marquee video ad. I will say we’re not reliant on M&E for, you know, business results like we used to. We’re not reliant on any one category. Like we used to be. M&E is going well. And we see opportunity for, you know, for strength in the category going into 2025.

Dan Jedda: To the last question, I’ll take the last question on 606. There was a very small 606 adjustment in Q4. I think I mentioned earlier, like, we do not expect 606 adjustments going forward. Our guide for 2025 does not have any 606 adjustments in there. Just given the way we’ve structured our agreements and the accounting policy, we apply against them. We don’t believe 606 will be in our numbers on a go-forward basis.

Alan Gould: Okay. Thanks for taking the questions.

Operator: Thank you. Our last question comes from the line of Barton Crockett with Rosenblatt. Your line is now open.

Barton Crockett: Okay. Great. Thanks for taking the question. I guess I was curious about some of the news flow overnight. So, you know, one of your business partners, the Trade Desk, was talking about some disappointment in their trends and, you know, it raises the question about, you know, their relationship with you, which you guys had called out last quarter as a source of strength, just this DSP channel generally where, you know, there’s some competitive kind of gyrations. And I’m just wondering if you could comment on the health of that relationship and the health of DSPs generally with you guys.

Anthony Wood: Hey. Hey, Barton. This is Anthony. I’ll just make a comment. I’ll turn it over to Charlie, I think. So just in general, I think we have a great relationship with the Trade Desk. I mean, it’s a very, you know, productive business relationship. You know, we’re obviously a very large supplier of ad inventory for connected TV that’s important to their business. They’re also helping bring us additional demand. So it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. You know, I don’t really follow Trade Desk and their stocks. I don’t know. I don’t understand and read their earnings. I’m not sure what’s going on there. But I’ll just say that, you know, I think our relationship is generally good. I mean, we are but we’re focused on all demand side.

Platform is part, you know, we want to be as diversified as possible. Trade Desk is an important partner, but there’s a lot of other big DSPs out there we’re working with all of them. So I don’t know. Charlie, do you want to add anything?

Charlie Collier: No. That’s right. We have integrations now with every major demand and supply side platform, and we’re working really diligently not just to be on them because we’ve done that, but to optimize those relationships and drive marketer results. So Anthony’s right. Trade Desk is a great partner. But not only are we expanding partnerships, we’re building deeper integrations with all of them, and this will drive more demand. We’re growing the number of advertisers we serve and the types of advertisers we serve. And I think you’re seeing signs we’re growing share of wallet. Earlier, we mentioned the Roku channel being up 82% year over year. We have a lot of inventory, and more importantly, we have a lot of high fidelity signals that make us a great partner, not just for the DSPs, but for agencies and, inevitably, for marketers, which is the most important.

So we’ll continue to do more integrations with the DSPs and the SSPs and expand our ability to serve the entire demand curve, as I said earlier, at multiple price points. So really, Barton, in the macro, what’s happening is that we’re driving incremental revenue and partnerships. And as we do so, I think you’ll see us ensure our inventory is available to advertisers and whichever platforms are easiest and most efficient for them to activate. And you’ll see us ensure that our data and our inventory partnerships are optimized. Which makes Roku inventory more visible programmatically. And all these partnerships are becoming more and more accountable to our clients’ needs. So really at the highest level, we’re driving better performance for advertisers across all sorts of platform relationships, and this should lead to deeper partnerships and more meaningful investment for Roku.

Barton Crockett: Okay. And then if I could just ask one other thing, the in the news Trade wars, tariffs, does this mean anything for you guys? Is there any risk on devices? From the tariffs in China any impact on advertising flows? I know, you know, Ford was cautionary about what steel could do to autos. The de minimis could affect e-commerce. Are you seeing anything?

Anthony Wood: Yeah. This is Anthony calling on that. But let me also just wrap up on Trade Desk. I’ll just say that just in summary, they’re a good partner. We enjoy working with them, and it’s a mutually beneficial relationship. I don’t think that’s gonna change. In terms of tariffs, you know, I mean well, I’ll just say at a high level, we don’t believe tariffs, you know, I mean, there’s a lot of different rumors about tariffs or discussions about tariffs. But in general, from what we can tell, we don’t believe the tariffs will have a material impact on our business. And I’ll turn it over to Mustafa to maybe explain in a little more detail why that’s the case.

Mustafa Ozgen: Hi, Barton. This is Mustafa speaking. Look. While tariffs could have a broad impact on the industry, in general, we believe the impact on Roku will be minimal. Manufacturing of our first-party products is already diversified around the world. So we are not really overly impacted by a single country concentration, for example, China concentration. And also, we believe that higher NPV prices actually may need to be raised to compensate for tariffs impact. This actually could move some customers into the value segment where we are really strongly positioned. So we may see some benefit from the tariffs in general.

Dan Jedda: Yeah. And this is Dan Barton. I just want to add to what Mustafa said, you know, from a device perspective, like, any impact on our gross margin related to tariffs we believe would be immaterial. And we don’t expect any impact on the platform revenue side of the business. To your point on certain verticals, there’s always that possibility that certain verticals are impacted in general. But, again, we’re very well diversified. Charlie talked a lot about that earlier. So we don’t see any issue on the platform side right now as it relates to tariffs.

Barton Crockett: Thank you, guys.

Operator: Thank you. I would now like to hand the call back over to Anthony Wood for closing remarks.

Anthony Wood: I’d just like to thank our employees, customers, advertisers, and content partners, and thank you for listening.

Operator: This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.