Roku users stream nearly 3 hours a day, most-searched term is ‘free’

Roku

• Roku
  executive Scott Rosenberg was interviewed Tuesday at Business
  Insider’s IGNITION
  2018 conference about his role in driving the company’s
  advertising revenue.
• Rosenberg said that Roku customers are interested in ad-free
  content — so much so that the most-searched term on the Roku
  channel is “free.”
• He also revealed that Roku users watch almost three hours of
  streaming content a day, on average.
• Roku is the most popular over-the-top (OTT) streaming
  device, but is
  facing growing competition from rivals Comcast, Amazon, and
  Apple.

Roku users watch an average of almost three hours of streaming
content per day, and many crave a viewing experience that is
advertising-free, Roku executive Scott Rosenberg said Tuesday at
Business Insider’s IGNITION conference.

Rosenberg, Roku’s senior vice president and general manager of
advertising, shared these statistics on stage at IGNITION 2018,
Business Insider’s ninth annual conference featuring leaders in
media and tech. He talked about the cord-cutting trend, where
users are consistently turning away from tradition “live”
programs on television and moving toward on-demand entertainment
through Roku and other over-the-top (OTT) streaming players.

“It’s very clear to us at Roku that consumers are cutting and
shaving the chord not just because they want more choices in the
matter, but because they’re looking for value,” Rosenberg said.
“So, free is a very important selection criteria as consumers get
into OTT.”

Much of Rosenberg’s work revolves around finding the right
balance between ad-free viewing that pleases consumers, and
ad-supported content that brings in revenue. Rosenberg said that
for Roku’s users — who on average watch 2.8 hours of streaming
content a day — advertisements need to be short, yet clickable
and effective, in order to keep viewers’ attention.

Despite Roku’s efforts to keep ads at a minimum, its customers
still crave content that is completely free of advertising. In
fact, Rosenberg said “free” is the most-searched term on the Roku
Channel, a one-stop channel for free content (some with ads, some
without)
that launched last year.

With 24 million users, Roku is the most popular OTT streaming
player, beating out similar devices from the likes of Amazon,
Apple, and Google. 

Read more:



‘We outperform all of them’: Roku is readying itself for
competition from the likes of Amazon and Comcast as the streaming
war heats up

Competition is growing in the streaming and on-demand
entertainment industry, however, as new players and industry
veterans look to enter the market or expand their reach. 

“I would say, broadly, consumers have so many more options
now to watch longform, premium video in our living room,”
Rosenberg
told Business Insider in November. “We all should expect that
the traditional video distributors will feel compelled to compete
more aggressively to keep consumer attention, and to compete at
the price point that consumers are demanding.”

Tune in to Day 2 of IGNITION 2018, where speakers include
Etsy CEO Josh Silverman and Barbara Corcoran from ABC’s “Shark
Tank: