Roku used to compare itself to large pay-TV providers in its shareholder letters. Now, the cable companies are doing it themselves.
Two of Comcast‘s strategic priorities that were outlined by CEO Brian Roberts on the company’s recent earnings call were aggregation and streaming. That’s exactly what Roku does in a nutshell, and Comcast has taken several steps to copy Roku’s products. Can Roku stave off the giant conglomerate?
Bringing content distribution into the 21st century
At its core, Comcast has always been an aggregator. The cable-TV bundle is just an aggregation of networks from various media companies, packaged up and sold to the end consumer. But there are a lot of sources beyond a cable bundle these days, and Comcast wants to be the one that brings them all together.
The company offers its X1 set-top box to video subscribers and the Flex box to broadband-only subscribers. Both use the same underlying software to aggregate content with a focus on video-on-demand from various sources.
Comcast has licensed its platform to a couple of other cable companies but sees much more potential to reach a broader audience. Roku, for example, counted 46 million active accounts on its devices as of the end of the third quarter. Comcast had just 32.7 million customer relationships as of the end of September.
