Roku reported another solid earnings quarter Thursday, meeting expectations with 14% total net revenue growth to $1.2 billion, and net income swinging from a $9 million loss for the third quarter of 2024 into a gain of $28.4 million.
Platform revenue, which includes Roku’s advertising business, surged 17% year-over-year in the third quarter to around $1.06 billion. Engagement also kept growing — streaming hours on the Roku platform totaled 36.5 billion from July through September, up 14%
Roku’s free, ad-supported streaming service, The Roku Channel, ranked as the No. 2 app on the Roku platform, second to all-powerful YouTube. For all U.S. connected TV viewing, The Roku Channel ranks in the top 5 of most-watched apps, according to Nielsen, accounting for 2.8% of all television usage in September.
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Roku also raised full-year guidance, saying it now expects “slightly” higher platform revenue in Q4. You can access Roku’s Q3 2025 shareholder letter here.
Early days
Speaking to equity analysts Thursday, Roku co-founder and CEO Anthony Wood outlined three areas of focus for Roku: making the home screen a more efficient producer of monetization; growing advertising demand; and expanding subscription revenue. These are the same focus areas he outlined starting back in April 2024 as priority areas to reaccelerate platform revenue growth.
Speaking to the first leg of the stool, Wood said Roku is getting set to roll out a revised home screen in 2026. “We have a very iconic home screen,” he noted. “It has a lot of fun and delight built into it, and we want to keep it iconic and differentiated, but we also want to make it more useful.”
As for growing ad demand, Roku cited the move to integrate itself will all the major demand-side platforms (DSPs) and, in the words of Roku media chief Charlie Collier, to “meet clients anywhere they want to transact."
Using a phrase Roku execs repeated often Thursday, Wood described Roku’s recent integration with Amazon’s DSP as being in the “early days.
“We just turned it on,” Wood said. “We haven’t really ramped up yet, but so far it’s looking good.”
Wood also predicted solid growth for Roku’s subscription business in 2026, noting the recent launch of $3-a-month ad-free SVOD Howdy. Again, Wood said it was “early days” for the subscription service, but he sees an open market niche for a platform that delivers FAST-like classic movies and series without commercial interruptions.
Meanwhile, Wood and his team were asked if Roku might assume a more aggressive posture in live sports in an effort to spur growth.
With Roku devices serving as the TV entry point for nearly half the broadband homes in America, Collier described the current fragmented state of live televised sports, and specifically that every NFL game is now available on streaming, as “nothing but a tailwind for Roku.” The platform, and features like the Sports Zone he said, serve as “lead-ins” for key live-sports events like the World Cup.
In other words, Roku doesn’t have to spend hundreds of millions — or billions — of dollars to license live sports rights. It can participate in the monetization through its content partners where it’s platform could also be a place that helps solve consumer struggles of finding where and when sporting events they want to watch are happening.
“The fact that sports is, and will continue to be, fragmented across apps is a big opportunity for us,” Wood said.
Article has been updated to attribute the quote "nothing but a tailwind for Roku" to Roku Media President Charlie Collier. A prior version incorrectly attributed the quote to Roku CEO Anthony Wood.