Roku surged past Wall Street expectations in the second quarter, with revenue and earnings ahead of analysts’ expectations.
Earnings per share hit $1.08 on a diluted basis, up from 7 cents a share in the year-earlier period. Total revenue climbed 22% to $1.35 billion, paced by a 25% rise in platform revenue driven equally by gains in advertising and subscriptions.
The report is the company’s first since agreeing to be acquired by Fox Corp. in June in a proposed $22 billion deal. The companies expect the transaction to close in the first half of 2027. Citing the deal, Roku elected not to convene an earnings conference call.
In their quarterly shareholder letter, CEO Anthony Wood and CFO and COO Dan Jedda said the platform revenue increase was largely due to the first major overhaul of the Roku home screen in more than a decade. Unveiled last May, the new interface completed its rollout in the third quarter, with international markets set to unveil it in the coming months.
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The new experience “is designed to maximize content discovery and personalization for our viewers,” the execs wrote, “while simultaneously delivering benefits to our content partners and advertisers, and growing platform monetization.”
Results thus far have been “encouraging,” the letter said. “For example, our new home screen improved our ability to retain households in the U.S., resulting in more users we can serve and thus reducing overall costs to grow streaming households.”
While advertising continues to be one of the bedrock elements of Roku’s business model, the company has been ramping up its ability to make money by enabling subscriptions to dozens of streaming services in the U.S. During the quarter, it added Peacock’s ad-free tier to its premium subscriptions hub, where Apple TV debuted earlier in the year.
Wood and Jedda in the letter called the Fox acquisition “an extraordinary opportunity to accelerate our vision, allowing us to scale faster and innovate more aggressively for viewers, partners, and advertisers.”