Roku reported a solid 16% YoY increase in total first-quarter net revenue, surpassing $1 billion for a third straight quarter, losses narrowing and time spent on its platform increasing by nearly 17% to 35.8 billion hours.
The streaming company reiterated its guidance for 2025, expecting total net revenue of $4.55 billion, a gross profit of $1.97 billion, and adjusted EBITDA of $350 million.
Roku also announced the $185 million acquisition of virtual MVPD company Frndly TV. Roku said $75 million of that purchase price was “held back” and “tied to meeting performance goals and milestones over the next two years.” (You read the press release on the Frndly TV purchase here.)
Still, Roku stock slid nearly 5% in after-hours trading Thursday.
Speaking to equity analysts Thursday, Roku CEO Anthony Wood conceded that there is “macro uncertainty” relating to the trade policies of President Donald Trump. But in justifying Roku’s reassertion of its full-year guidance, Wood cited “a lot of Roku-specific positives,” including a trend toward “advertisers looking for more ROI and flexibility,” adding, “Roku is good at those things.”
Programmatic advertising on Roku is gaining steam, he said, with advertisers looking for “flexible, non-guaranteed purchases” versus traditional insertion-order buys.
Roku reported a 17% YoY increase in platform revenue in Q1 to $880.8 million.
Like Netflix, Roku is no longer posting user growth in its earnings reports, but Wood said the company is on pace to soon have 100 million streaming households on its connected TV platform. (It currently has 90 million.)
Meanwhile, also relating to the likelihood of a tariff-induced economic downturn, Wood said that Roku is “better positioned” than competitors on the device side of the business.
On the gadget side, revenue increased 11% YoY to $139.9 million, but device gross loss more than tripled year-over-year to $19.1 million.
Asked by an analyst on the call if Frndly TV was a retrograde platform relating to a “dying” linear cable TV business, Wood insisted that the linear TV presentation format is “still very popular.” He added that Frndly TV has “a lot of brands that will stick around, like Lifetime, Hallmark and A+E.”
Noting that the 125 million users reached by the Roku home screen daily will help further grow the Frndly platform, Wood added, “I don’t think of them as a vMPVD.”