Q2 2024 Roku Inc Earnings Call

Participants

Conrad Grodd; Vice President, Investor Relations; Roku Inc

Anthony Wood; Chief Executive Officer; Roku Inc

Dan Jedda; Chief Financial Officer; Roku Inc

Charles Collier; President, Roku Media; Roku Inc

Shyam Patil; Analyst; Susquehanna International Group

Jason Helfstein; Analyst; Oppenheimer & Co. Inc.

Laura Martin; Senior Analyst; Needham & Company LLC

Vasily Karasyov Karasyov; Analyst; Cannonball Research LLC

Peter Supino; Analyst; Wolfe Research, LLC

Michael Morris Morris; Analyst; Guggenheim Securities LLC

Tim Nollen Nollen; Analyst; Macquarie Group Limited

Cory Carpenter Carpenter; Analyst; JPMorgan Chase & Co

David Joyce Joyce; Analyst; Seaport Research Partners

Presentation

Operator

Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for standing by. Welcome to the second-quarter 2024 Roku earnings conference call. (Operator Instructions) Please be advised that today’s conference is being recorded.
I would like now to turn the conference over to Conrad Grodd, Vice President of Investor Relations. Please go ahead.

Conrad Grodd

Welcome to Roku’s second-quarter 2024 earnings call. On today’s call are Anthony Wood, Roku’s Founder and CEO; Dan Jedda, our CFO; and Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media.
Our full results and additional management commentary are available in our shareholder letter on our IR website at roku.com/investor.
On this call, we’ll make forward-looking statements, which are subject to risks and uncertainties. Please refer to our shareholder letter and periodic SEC filings for risk factors that could cause our results to differ materially from these forward-looking statements.
We’ll also present GAAP and non-GAAP financial measures. Reconciliations of non-GAAP measures to the most comparable GAAP financial measures are provided in our shareholder letter. Unless otherwise stated, all comparisons will be against our results for the comparable 2023 period.
Now, I’ll hand the call over to Anthony.

Story continues

Anthony Wood

Thanks, Conrad. This quarter, Roku continued to build on our foundation of unmatched scale and engagement, while remaining focused on operational discipline. We continue to lean into our unique assets, the Roku home screen, which is the beginning of the various TV experience.
Every day, US household is representing more than 120 million people began their streaming journey on the Roku home screen. This fact, along with our development and operations pipeline makes me confident we will be able to accelerate our platform revenue in 2025.
In Q2, we grew streaming households 14% year over year, streaming hours 20% year over year, and platform revenue 11% year over year. In the US, Roku is the number one TV OS by both TV shared and our screen, and our share of each is more than double the next largest operating system. The Roku Channel was our #3 app by both reach and engagement. This is a great achievement and demonstrates that Roku is building the lead-in to TV.
Another result we are proud of is our fourth straight quarter of delivering positive adjusted EBITDA and generating positive free cash flow. More than a year ago, we set a target of positive adjusted EBITDA for the full year 2024. As ambitious as this target was then, we did the work of rightsizing our cost structure and delivered on a full year early.
Looking ahead, we will maintain this strong track record of execution as we focus on our monetization initiatives, including maximizing ad demand for Roku, leveraging the Roku home screen as the lead-in for TV, and growing Roku build descriptions.
Now, let me turn it over to Dan.

Dan Jedda

Thanks, Anthony. We ended Q2 with 83.6 million streaming households, up 14% year over year, with sequential net adds of 2 million driven by both TVs and streaming players. We continue to drive strong growth in engagement with streaming hours up 20% year over year. We also grew engagement per account globally, with streaming hours per streaming household per day of 4.0 hours in Q2 of 2024, up from 3.8 hours in Q2 of last year.
In Q2, we grew total net revenue 40% year over year to $968 million. Platform revenue was $824 million, up 11% year over year driven by both streaming services distribution and advertising activities, while offset by a challenged M&E vertical. Streaming services distribution activities grew faster than overall platform revenue, benefiting in part from subscription price increases. Devices revenue increased 39% year over year in Q2, driven by the expansion of the retail distribution of Roku-branded TVs.
ARPU was $40.68 in Q2 on a trailing 12-month basis, flat year over year. This reflects an increasing share of streaming households in international markets where we are currently focused on growing scale and engagement with monetization efforts in early stages.
Q2 total gross margin was 44%, down slightly year over year. Platform gross margin of 53% was relatively in line year over year, while devices gross margin was negative 11%, which was up 6 points year over year.
Q2 adjusted EBITDA was $44 million, which is above our outlook. The better-than-expected performance was driven by our platform segment.
Free cash flow was $318 million on a trailing 12-month basis and we ended the quarter with $2.1 billion of cash and cash equivalents. We continue to see leverage in our operating model with our fourth straight quarter of positive adjusted EBITDA and free cash flow.
Let me turn to our outlook for the third quarter. We anticipate total net revenue of $1.01 billion, gross profit of $440 million with gross margin of 44%, and adjusted EBITDA of $45 million.
Our outlook for total net revenue anticipates an 11% year-over-year increase. We expect Q3 platform revenue to grow 9% year over year. This takes into account a challenging year-over-year growth rate comparison within streaming services distribution, along with elevated positive 606 adjustments in Q3 of last year. While we expect M&E to remain challenged, we anticipate the year-over-year growth of advertising activities to accelerate in Q3. Platform margin will be in line with Q2 at roughly 53%.
On the device side, we expect Q3 revenue to grow 24% and margins to be in line with Q2 in the negative low double digits, reflecting continued expansion and investment in our Roku branded TV program. We’re benefiting from operational improvements we made over the course of the past year. And as a result, we continue to expect 2024 OpEx growth rates to be in the low single digits when excluding impairment and restructuring charges.
We are confident the year-over-year growth rate of platform revenue will begin to accelerate sequentially in Q4 of this year as a result of executing on our monetization initiatives to maximize ad demand and leverage our home screen as the lead-in for TV.
With that, let’s take questions. Operator?

Question and Answer Session

Operator

(Operator Instructions) Shyam Patil, Susquehanna International Group.

Shyam Patil

Hey, guys. Congrats on the nice results. I had a couple of questions. First, there’s been a lot of commentary recently about excess supply of PC inventory in the market and downward pressure on CPMs. I was wondering if you could just talk about this and maybe what you’re seeing? And then second question, can you talk about what you guys are currently seeing with M&E, just your expectations there? Thank you.

Anthony Wood

Hi, Shyam. This is Anthony. Yeah, I’ll be happy to take that question. So first, I’ll just say that Roku is not impacted by market-driven pricing changes in the same way that other streaming services seem to be. And this is because we, Roku, are streaming platform. We’re not solely a streaming service.
And if you think about what that means, like as a platform, as a streaming platform, one of the benefits is that we have a diversified set of revenue streams. Our platform business consists of our streaming services distribution activities, which are diversified as well as advertising, which are also diversified. So if you look at streaming service distribution, we’re investing in areas like Roku built subscriptions as well as premium subscriptions. And then you think about advertising activities, which are also diversified, obviously, we have traditional video as traditional streaming ads on our platform across our platform.
But unlike normal streaming service, we have a unique set of ad products and sponsorships that are only possible because we own the platform and we integrate these throughout the viewer experience. So we have diversified revenue streams, a platform level revenue streams.
And then if I even take a step back and think about like what are the primary factors that drive our platform business, our platform business growth is driven by the growth of the different components of that business. So for example, we continue to maintain strong growth of streaming households. We added 2 million net adds in the quarter recently. Now, it’s 83 million almost 84 million streaming households. So we continue to add global streaming households.
They’re very strong streaming hour engagement that also continues strong, and a lot of that is monetizable engagement for us. And then, of course, we continue to invest a lot of our R&D effort into building and creating new monetization products across the viewer experience. So these are the primary things that drive our growth.
And then another critical point, I guess, I’d just like to mention is, I don’t know we said it before, but it’s really important. The Roku home screen is one of our, probably our most important asset. It’s the reason why they lead into TV. Every day, US households with more than 120 million people, start their streaming experience at the Roku home screen. And that’s super valuable scale to advertisers as well as promoting our owned and operated properties.
But for advertisers, our home screen and our viewer experience for our platform reaches years before they decide what to watch. And after they spent some time trying to decide what to watch, they pick a streaming app and they fragment into different streaming apps. And a lot of those team apps don’t have ads. And so for many of our viewers, promotions and advertising in our home screen is the only ad they’re going to see.
So the home screen is a very important part of our strategy for growing our monetization, something that’s working well for us. And then if I just think about what are the actual primary challenges to our platform business right now is, like we mentioned a few times, is continued weakness within the M&E vertical. But we have a great ad business, and we’re well positioned to accelerate our ad business.
So with that, I’ll turn it over to Charlie to share some more details.

Charles Collier

Great. Thanks, Anthony, and thanks for the question, Shyam. I appreciate it. there is a lot of supply in the market. You’re right. And since Anthony addressed our differentiating platform advantages, why don’t I speak about advertising directly.
We’re actively creating new revenue sources all the time at Roku. We’re building new ad products across our UI. And these serve two purposes. They both drive demand, and they also fulfill demand. A few good examples are video ads on the home screen, our customizable Roku city buildings and cars, sponsorships across our UI in our content destinations, like the NFL experience, our Olympic zone, which is booming now, actually, I think you might be looking at it on your screen as we speak in the updated metal count. And it includes our all-things food and all things home areas.
And then if you think about it, Shyam, there’d be open and interoperable way we partner with clients and use our unique ad targeting and measurement capabilities to help them meet their goals. That’s really important. And we talk a lot about how we come to market.
Inherent in your question is that we’ve been competitively priced, and we remain competitively priced, and we’ve built multiple products and partner collaborations each at different points across the demand chain. And that’s important, because I’ve mentioned over the last few quarters, we have strategically pivoted to all sorts of third-party relationships, third-party DSPs, channel partners, and others. And we are very much focused on meeting our clients where and how they wish to transact.
And Anthony mentioned it, we have the flexibility to handle really well the market fluctuations you mentioned because of our increasing supply. And that’s possible for a bunch of reasons. One is that the Roku Channel is up over 75% year on year, and it’s also because of the growth across the entire Roku platform experience.
So I’ll reiterate what Anthony led with, which is as a streaming platform, we do have distinct advantages over the streaming services that compete on our platform. So our unique assets allow to adapt and be less impacted than others seem to be by market supply dynamics. And for all those reasons, I’m really optimistic that we’ll ramp revenue into the back half of 2024.

Anthony Wood

(multiple speakers) You also asked about M&A. So let me just talk about that for a second. In our prior calls, we mentioned that we expected the M&E vertical to be challenged in 2024, and that’s what we’re seeing.
But despite these challenges, the challenges we’re seeing in the M&E vertical, we expect advertising activities on our platform to accelerate in the second half, and we expect to continue to grow platform revenue. So but I’ll let Charlie and Dan share more detail on that.

Charles Collier

Well, this is Charlie. He’s right. We’ve diversified the overall ad business well. Before I get into that, I should note, I’m proud of this. We’re really good at M&E and we’re a must-have for our M&A partners. One way we’ve diversified is that we’ve increased the number of ad categories and/or ad units in the viewer experience. We’ve opened up inventory to new advertisers and it’s inventory that used to be reserved almost exclusively for M&E brands and performance advertisers. And that diversification has worked well.
Our new marquee video ad unit on the home screen is one example. We actually announced that at the upfront. And we opened a limited invite-only beta for this new video ad unit, and it’s sold out in the first mont,h and the participation was exactly what we hope to see from premier brand,s like the Home Depot and Disney, automotive in Mini.
So regardless of short-term broad market softness across M&E in the marketplace. Our platform is still the best place to attract and retain viewers, to build subscriptions, and to help our partners manage churn.

Dan Jedda

And let me just add one point to that. Due to the efforts to diversify our ad demand and ad products and our many growth initiatives, all the examples that Charlie just stated, M&E is a significantly smaller percent of our overall platform business now versus the last several years. So while we’re in a good position to benefit from any M&E rebound and any new M&E entrants into the market, we’re not relying on the vertical for future growth.

Shyam Patil

Great. Thank you, guys.

Operator

Jason Helfstein, Oppenheimer.

Jason Helfstein

Thank you very much. It’s really exciting that you’re now supporting UID.
Charlie, can I ask you what kind of lift are you expecting in demand or pricing from this partnership? And how long will it take to ramp demand from cradle. And do you expect kind of a similar integration with DV360 at some point?

Anthony Wood

Hey, Jason, this is Anthony. Let me just kick this off, and then I’ll turn it over to Charlie.
We are very focused on accelerating our platform revenue, and we have as last mentioned — as we have mentioned, a variety of initiatives to increase monetization and grow platform revenue that we’re executing against, one of those initiatives is to grow our relationships with all third-party platforms. And we’re making progress on that. And the announcement today around UID integration is one step in that strategy. I feel like we’re making good progress against that strategy.
But I think Charlie can talk more about it.

Charles Collier

Well, thanks for noting it, Jason. It’s really all about making Roku more performant and efficient for our clients. On the Trade Desk specifically, we’re only a couple of months in, but the partnership with them has been really well received and been great to work with and our relationship is growing.
So to answer your time and question, it’s early days, but we’re pleased with the progress. And we look forward to continued innovations ahead. We think this will continue to drive demand.
Unified ID 2.0, or UID2, is an identity solution developed by the Trade Desk. And really, for us, it will allow others to achieve more precise targeting and enhanced data collaboration. So you asked about others. It’s not just Trade Desk. We’ve grown relationships across the entire programmatic demand and measurement ecosystem, including enhanced partnerships from folks like iSpot PubMatic, Magnite, and more.
The team and I talk a lot about the word interoperable and being open, because we actually believe in addition to the benefits I just mentioned. Our flexibility and open approach to partnerships are going to help differentiate Roku and benefit advertisers. So it drives performance for clients and demand, as you asked, for Roku Media.
I take really seriously our leadership position as the leader TV streaming. We’re triple the streaming hours of the next largest platform in the US. And so partnerships like these, the ones I’ve just described, put Roku and our partners right at the center of the open premium CTV ecosystem.

Jason Helfstein

Thank you.

Operator

Laura Martin, Needham.

Laura Martin

So the first one I definitely think is for Anthony. So I think last quarter, you said you have everybody in your distribution activities now reporting to you, which is the concept I love. And I like your three integrations; the execution you put in the note about the new content row, facilitating subscription-based steps with your Roku Pay, and also the special thing you did with NBC around the Olympics.
My question is, when you think about a year from now, clean piece of paper, what’s the north star here? Are you trying to get the revenue mix to 50/50 ads and let’s call this a subscription revenue stream? Is there products that you want to introduce because clients are asking for them? We talk to me about the next year and what we should expect to see a year from now that’s driving the subscription revenue streams at Roku.

Anthony Wood

Hey, Laura, thanks for the question. Yeah. Well, I mean, obviously, a big goal for us for this year and next year is to reaccelerate our platform monetization. I feel like we’re making great progress on that. We’ve talked about expanding our third-party partnerships as a way to increase demand for our advertising. There’s a lot of opportunity there.
It’s an area that, although we’ve invested a little bit in the past, we just mostly spend our time on other initiatives. And now we’re turning our attention to that one. There’s a lot of opportunity on that side. And the goal of that, of course, is just to drive more demand for our apps. You’ve got a lot of supply of that and we have the ability to grow our supply. So we’re highly focused on growing demand and third-party partnerships.
It’s a one way to do that. The other way we do that is building unique ad products into our UI. A simple example is Roku City, which is very popular, we added sponsored links to Roku City and the people. Companies love that as a unique product. And when they buy that product, we bundle other ad products with that. So increasing demand.
I mentioned subscriptions. So there’s a lot we can do on subscriptions. We have a large subscription business, but given the scale of our engagement, I believe there’s opportunity to grow subscriptions. So we have a variety of initiatives there. And that involves signing up new subscribers, but also reducing churn. There’s things we can do on both of that, both of those fronts.
And then a big focus for me is how do we make best use of our home screen. It’s a key asset. But again, we’ve done a lot over the years to build our business. There’s areas we’re focused on. There’s areas we focus on less, not because they weren’t important just we have to choose.
And the home screen is something that is a huge asset for us. It’s iconic and viewers love it, but we have not really spent much time evolving over the last many years, actually. And so there’s just a huge amount of opportunity to keep it iconic but also make it more useful for viewers and also drive more monetization, so driving more subscriptions, driving more engagement, ad products, and sponsorship built into the home screen.
So I think if I think a year from now, I think we’ll continue to see evolution of our home screen. I mean, so far, all we’ve really done is that one content wrote the top, which has been working well for us, but that’s really just the tip of the iceberg of what we can do. So those are the kinds of things that we’re working on.

Laura Martin

Fantastic. My other one is on M&E. I will take the point that M&E is a lot smaller than it used to be. But I’m really — Wall Street loves lead indicators. It feels to me like this Deadpool movie and Barbie and Oppenheimer, when these big movies come into the box office, do they eventually show up in streaming and therefore, they show up as an ad on your front page?
Are we able as Wall Street to look at what’s happening at the box office and then extrapolate that into your M&E revenue two or three quarters later as those films come to the streaming platforms?

Anthony Wood

Well, let me take a shot at that, and then I’ll turn it over to Charlie who really understands our M&E business very well. M&E is pretty broad-based. It’s not just — I think, you can’t really just look at new releases and extrapolate from that. I mean M&E is — it’s an internal term. It’s a term we use that means media and entertainment. It’s a term we use to refer to our basically our endemic partners like services on the platform that wants to sign on these subscribers or increase engagement or sell transactions and all of those things happen through M&E and it’s also distributed.
One way we’re good at it is it distributed throughout platform. There’s, of course, the Marquee ad. That’s a primary way. But there’s a lot of other ways that we drive those things for our partners, subscriptions, transactions, engagement, and so it’s complicated. I mean we do — it’s deeply integrated into the platform.
But Charlie, do you want to share?

Charles Collier

Sure. That’s spot on. And Laura, the way I think about it is M&E is really a category for us, because we are so good at driving people streaming business. Literally, you click on an ad here and also watch it here. So it’s a unique category to us. And as it does well and as there are new entrants, we’re always positioned to do well in that.
And that’s why we break that out. But your point is right as well. When you think about the big movies, all of our strategy is to establish that we’re broad reach in the lead-in television. And so with households with 120 million people, which is really Super Bowl sides reach every day, we really can drive an impact and put people in seats at movie theaters.
So as they spend more and as we do the improvements to the home screen that Anthony talks about, those are strategies that overlap and we’ll have more and more value to people who need broad reach because you can’t fake scale, and we have scale. So our home screen and broad reach strategy, Anthony said, we’re just at the beginning of, will drive broader reach advertising, which is stuff like what you’ve seen from Disney over the last few weeks, they’ve had a nice run.
I’ll tell you also, partnerships, a lot of what we’re talking about in terms of making Roku more performant and more efficient for our advertisers, is also allowing us different types of partnerships. So we just did a deal with Fandango. And that’s all about proving that we are not just effective for them, but that we can get people into seats. And so I’m very enamored, one of the reasons I came here is we’re so good, not just at the top of the funnel with the broader reach, but with proving performance and you’re seeing it in our partnerships that they’re acknowledging it. And then we’re driving outcomes and driving the KPIs of partners just like we will for the studios.

Anthony Wood

(multiple spekaers) Thanks, Laura. This is Anthony. I was just going to comment one last comment, which is just that, I mean, we are very good at M&E and we’re getting better at it, and it’s a good business for us. But the key factor that’s driving — the reason it’s challenged is because it’s pretty simple, that a lot of streaming services are pulling back on their marketing budgets. And that’s having some impact on the market and us as well.

Laura Martin

Thank you very much. Great numbers, you guys.

Operator

Vasily Karasyov, Cannonball Research.

Vasily Karasyov Karasyov

Thank you. I wanted to ask about distribution revenue. First of all, was there 606 adjustments in the quarter, if there was, would you mind telling us how big it was?
And then looking at the next year revenue acceleration, does that assume that the distribution revenue continues to grow at the rate that seems to be growing now or should it accelerate because we are comping against fairly big 606 adjustments last year. So I would appreciate any help on this. Thank you.

Dan Jedda

Yeah. I’ll take that one. We did have a 606 adjustment in Q2. It was similar to the adjustment that we had last quarter, and it was primarily due to the — our subscriptions increasing prices when our partners increase prices, we benefit from that, not just in our revenue, but it can lead to 606 adjustment. We don’t forecast 606 adjustments because the forecast takes that into account. But yes, we did have one for Q2.
In terms of your question on acceleration, as we talked about the acceleration that we expect to see in Q4, we talked also about the acceleration from Q2 into Q3 for advertising. That was specific to advertising.
In my prepared remarks, I talked about SSD or the streaming distribution business having difficult comps because of all the price increases, and the subscription businesses that we saw in H2 of last year, and in H1 of this year, and it’s very hard to predict those price increase. And so if we see similar price increases across the SVOD partners, we’ll benefit from that.
We’ll also benefit from all the work that we’re doing and driving more subscriptions. That is what Anthony talked about earlier on the call. And how that compares from an acceleration standpoint, I would expect that just based on the difficult comp, the acceleration is going to be led more by the advertising business with SSD moderating going forward. But again, it really does depend on a lot of the price increases that we see from our SVOD partners.

Peter Supino

Thank you very much.

Operator

Peter Supino, Wolf Research.

Peter Supino

Hi. Two questions, one on third-party ad sales and another on the cost and getting apps and getting screened real estate. On sells, I wanted to ask you why now on using third-party DSPs to sell Roku Channel ad inventory, particularly the third-party partnership? Should we think about that as over the long run, a disinflationary or decision for you relative to your prior strategy and why now? Obviously, everybody wants to sell more volume, but there’s a pro and con to that decision.
So I’d love to hear your thoughts on that. And then on the costs, you’ve had a very advantageous commercial terms with TV manufacturers over time, and also with streaming app owners over time. And I wonder how many changes in the market for those relationships. Thank you.

Anthony Wood

Thank you. This is Anthony. On third-party ad sales and why now, I’ll let Charlie give his thoughts. But I’ll just say from my point of view. Over the years, we’ve created a streaming platform and it’s not — it’s a lot of work. You’ve got to do a lot of different stuff. And there’s a lot of places you can focus. There’s a lot of different ways to make money and you sort of have to choose.
And so in the past, we’ve chosen things that have worked really well for us to focus on. And obviously, we’re not stopping doing those. We’re going to continue to do those. But integrating with third-party partners is something we’ve done in the past. It’s not that it’s new. It’s just that we’ve never really focused on it as a key initiative that we’re going to really push on.
And it was just a choice you made. These other opportunities where we thought were better turns at that moment in time, at this moment in time, it’s the one that we’ve chosen. And without going through that, the way we rank different options. I mean we’ve got a lot of options on where we can spend our time is the one that we believe is going to have a big impact over the next year.
And also a little bit related to the fact that the evolution of the industry, advertising, even though it’s often delivered programmatically these days, it’s still often sold through people on the street, but it’s increasingly going through programmatic demand platforms and demand is also increasingly being sourced from those platforms. And it’s clear that’s the future of the initiation of the question of how long is it going to take. And so it’s our judgment now it’s the right time. So that’s basically the answer.
I don’t know, Charlie, do you have anything to add to that?

Charles Collier

Yeah, I agree with all that. And look, media performance will differentiate us. There’s something very empowering for us about being an interoperable platform in a world that is not often open or interoperable certainly across the ecosystem. So we announced something called Roku Exchange. It’s a TV streaming first ad tech solution, and it’s the way we bring Roku’s differentiated tech stack to market.
So to your point, we’ve benefited from our tech stack to date. And now we’re bringing it to market in a way that allows us to take all of the advertising capabilities from our DSP and add an intelligence layer that allows for our data-driven media to be matched with best product across the pragmatic ecosystem.
So Peter, you think about the scale that we offer, we talk a lot, it’s funny about having unmatched scale in the homes with 120 million people every day. That means we also have the largest CTV data set to match with someone like the Trade Desk, and that will separate us in this market. So Anthony is right, the timing is right, and it allows us to be confident that we’re building with the right people in the right way to grow into the future.

Anthony Wood

And then second question, I wasn’t quite sure I understood, but I think it basically was, is there any change in the dynamics around apps on our platform. And perhaps you mentioned — (multiple speakers).
Yeah. So I think the main change, I would say, is just the continued growth in Roku’s scale. I mean, we’re approaching half of all broadband households in the United States, [100] households with 120 million people every day turn on a Roku TV. We put a chart in the shareholder letter that showed just the massive scale of our engagement compared to other platforms.
I mean we’re a must-have platform if you’re going to launch a streaming service or if you want to build a market a streaming service. And so certainly, that scale is impacting our relationships with streaming services. I mean, obviously, there’s a mutually beneficial relationship for both of us. But our large scale is making us really important to streaming services platforms. That’s probably the main change.

Operator

Michael Morris, Guggenheim Securities.

Michael Morris Morris

Good afternoon. Thanks, guys. Thanks for all the information and the question. I had two. I wanted to just ask a little bit more about the revenue guide at platform. Dan, you helped a little bit with the 606. But I’m curious just to understand the at least reported deceleration going from 11% this quarter to 9% next quarter. Is the 606 impact that you’re expecting in the 3Q or the comping that much bigger in 3Q versus 2Q?
And then also several price increases have been announced, right? So I think Peacock, Max, Paramount Plus, if I remember correctly. So is that taken into account in your third quarter guide? Or is that something that would be incremental? And then I have a bigger picture one, but I’d love to hear your thoughts on that first.

Dan Jedda

Yeah, I’ll take that question. So the 606 impact for Q3 of last year was similar to the 606 of Q2 of last year and Q2 of this year. So there is that impact on the sequential decline. And you could roughly call it around 200 basis points. But the other piece, which we tried to lay out in the prepared remarks, is the SSD comp, the streaming services distribution comp just gets a lot more challenging in H2 of this year relative to H2 last year, simply because we are comping a lot of price increases that happened last year.
And yes, there are some price increases that happened this year, but not to the level from what we see that happened last year. So the SSD business just doesn’t have a much more difficult comp, which does play into that Q2 to Q3 decel from 11% to the 9% that we guided also the 606 I just mentioned. And then, of course, I said in my prepared remarks that we are expecting advertising to accelerate on a sequential basis during that quarter, during from Q2 to Q3.

Michael Morris Morris

Okay. That’s really helpful. And then my second question is on the data that you put in, and Anthony just referenced about your share of the US CTV OS market, right, at almost 50%, a very impressive number. But your CTV revenue as part of share, I think, is much, much smaller than that. My math would say less than 10%.
So my question is, do you see 50% as a number that investors should be thinking about as share of the market that you can be striving toward. How can we reconcile that share with how big you feel your company can be in the CTV marketplace?

Anthony Wood

This is Anthony. I’ll take that. But before I answer, I just want to make sure I understood the question. So what were you comparing it to? Our share of the —

Michael Morris Morris

The CTV. So I understand there are different revenue sources. I understand that, but showing that chart, I think leads investors to see you as roughly half of the, as you like to say, the starting point or the launch pad. So how much of that can translate to financial performance? Could you be 50% of the CTV marketplace over time?

Anthony Wood

Yeah. I mean I think that there’s — that scale and — I mean, we expect to continue growing our scale, both in the U.S. and internationally. Both in terms of active accounts, but also streaming hours per account. So that’s the basis, one of the basis on which our growth is based and we’re going to continue to drive that.
That scale does create the opportunity for us to continue to increase monetization per account in a variety of ways, including creating new products that we own and operate or that we integrate into our platform. And so yes, there’s a lot of room to continue to grow. If you think about the streaming hours on our platform, they range from hours that we completely monetize 100% on like ours in the Roku Channel to ours that we make less monetization on. So where it’s going to land, it’s hard for me to say.

Michael Morris Morris

Great, thank you. Appreciate it.

Operator

Tim Nollen, Macquarie.

Tim Nollen Nollen

Hi, thanks very much. Can we switch to the devices side, please? I’m just curious, you had really strong growth in the quarter. It looks like some okay growth forecast for Q3 as well. There was some question about your distribution via various retailers such as Walmart. I wonder if you could speak about how your retailing strategy is going.
And when do we actually comp against your own teeth coming out Q3, but I can’t remember. And just kind of how much impact might we expect for that in Q3 and Q4.

Anthony Wood

All right. Thanks, Tim. This is Anthony. I’ll take that and then maybe I’ll turn it over to Dan to talk about comping against our own TVs.
In general, the device side of our business, which is focused on growing active accounts, signing up new streaming households is doing really well. I mean, we have a product that we spent the last 16 years building. Consumers love it. It’s a great product. It’s a great brand. It’s got strong momentum in the market. Like I said, we added 2 million net accounts in the quarter.
And that side of our business, growing active accounts from selling devices comes from selling — there’s sort of three pillars to that. The biggest pillar actually is the licensing program, where we licensed Roku TVs to other OEMs. We license the platform to other OEMs. That’s the biggest piece, but also quite big as streaming players. We sell a lot of streaming players.
And then Roku-branded TVs or first-party Roku TVs, that’s relatively new for us, is growing. It’s ramping nicely, like we think it’s a good program, but it’s still got ways to go.
And then in Q1, we mentioned that we added in terms of Roku TV first-party TVs, Roku — sorry, Roku-branded Roku TVs. In Q1, we added — we mentioned before that we added Amazon, Costco, Walmart.com. And then in this quarter, we expanded distribution to include Target and some other specialty retailers, so we’re expanding distribution.
In April, the new Roku Pro Series hit the market. The Pro Series is our higher-performing Roku-branded TVs, receiving really strong reviews, selling well. For example, Yahoo! Tech, named the Pro Series their favorite TV of 2024. So I would say, in general, that part of our business is doing well. And we expect it to continue to grow for the foreseeable future, both actually in the US, where we have very strong market share, but we still think there’s room to grow there. And then also globally, of course, is a big focus for us.
And then on the branded TV, like I said, it’s still fairly early days for that. I mean it’s starting to ramp up. The scale is good. But there’s a lot of room — I think a lot of room to continue to grow that, but I’ll turn it over to Dan.

Dan Jedda

Yeah. I’ll just add that we launched in Q1 of last year. But just as a reminder, for all of last year, we were exclusive with Best Buy, and Anthony labeled off all the distribution partners we now have starting in Q1 of this year and adding in Q2 and this year as well with Target and some specialty Visa. So we’re very well distributed in FY24 versus FY23. So we do expect to — the Roku branded TV to continue to ramp, and you’ll see that in our guide and in our reported results as we go forward.
We’re happy with it. We’re happy with our distribution partners and we’re seeing great results from it. So it’s a big win for us.

Tim Nollen Nollen

And a quick follow-up. When can we think — when can we expect to get closer to breakeven on gross profit? If you’re ramping up more on the owned branded TVs, maybe the higher price sets coming out now, I’m guessing that helps to get closer to breakeven on gross profit?

Dan Jedda

Yeah, I’ll take that one as well. So we were at negative 11% in our device margin business. And we guided to a similar level in Q3, which is the low double digit, negative low double digits on Roku-branded TV.
So as Anthony mentioned, we’re early on in our ramp to scale. And as we get scale, our component costs should come down. I can’t speak to market pricing. We watch that very closely as well. But we do believe that the component costs will continue to go down to scale.
So I expect over time that we will see improvements in device margin. Again, just as a scaling and getting very good at managing the BOM cost. We saw this with players and Roku does an exceptionally good job of managers. It is a core competency of the company. But for the next several quarters, I think we’re going to be in this range just because it takes many quarters to get to the scale where you start to see the benefit from component costs come down.

Operator

Cory Carpenter, JPMorgan.

Cory Carpenter Carpenter

I had two advertising questions for Charlie or Anthony. First, could you provide an update on the news front, maybe the broader market, what you’re seeing and anything Roku specific?
And then secondly, how are you thinking about the impact to advertising in the second half of the year from the political and mix given your announced partnership.

Anthony Wood

Hey, Cory. Thanks for the questions. Charlie will take both of those actually.

Charles Collier

Cory, the answer is we’re seeing good momentum on news front, it’s been a positive market for us. And we’ve been growing our share generally across the board, while continuing to embrace new ways of working and what is unquestionably modern more digital-first ecosystem. The digital transition absolutely benefits Roku and our clients.
Good news is we’re hearing a lot of excitement around our new products, like the video ads and the marquee and sports participation. You mentioned in your next question in the Olympics and all we’ve done Major League Baseball. And we’ve also invested, and this isn’t quite as visible as those, we’ve invested a lot in partnerships to make Roku easier to buy and measure. So we’ve been getting the feedback we wanted, which is that we’re making it easier to purchase Roku Media and onboard new clients and then measure their performance.
And I think you’re going to be hearing that more and more. So it’s a different marketplace than it used to be. And we’re ready while the video revenue is still purchased during the upfront, and we’re building that share, we also expect buying to be executed across a bunch of channels both direct and programmatic all year long with all sorts of flexibility built in because of the market dynamic you mentioned in your question.
So on the momentum, we’re closing the upfront with Poise. We’re building share and we’re having great conversations both about the upfront and establishing client KPIs really well beyond the upfront. And it’s a change we’re ready for, and I feel confident with our position.
On the Olympics — on political, look, political holds us in a terrific position as we count down to November and the completion of the ’24 election cycle. And while we’re happy with our political ad sales, it really is just one part of our growing and diverse advertising business. What they’re noticing like other categories is we have the tools and tech that make Roku a strategic platform for advertisers. So they’re taking advantage of our scale and our ability to target desirable audiences and geographies and Anthony said something earlier that I think bears repeating. This is another category where Roku is getting better every cycle. We really are improving, which is terrific.
The Olympics, I’m really excited about. You just saw on the screen before we customize that experience. And if you understand Roku’s strategy and market differentiation, the Olympics is a really great example of both. We talk a lot, we did at our upfront. We talked to advertisers all the time about our unique position to lead in to all of television.
And we’re working so closely with Peacock and NBC to be the lead into the Olympics. And it’s clearly working. I keep getting text from folks in France that say we’re on fire and we’re helping drive their engagement.
So what our Olympics partnership with them was, and it was a series of custom integrations, ability to innovate and are also ability to build really bespoke ad-supported experience around tentpole events. And what I like about it, not just that it’s working for our great partners at NBC and Peacock, but we can do this for all sorts of major events across television. It’s totally something Roku has a right to win at. So we have the scale and focus to be the lead into television. That’s a differentiator.
I said before, you can’t fake scale and you can’t fake that we have home with nearly 120 million viewers every day coming through our front door. So the good news about this, and I’ll end here is our Olympic experience is great for viewers. They’re using it. It’s making the Olympics easier. It’s great for content owners who are our partners and obviously, it benefits advertisers.
In fact, we co-hold the Olympics with NBC and that whole lead-in experience.
So we launched the Olympic zone. That’s going well. We are doing similar things for Major League Baseball and through our NFL experience. And again, it’s a total differentiator and improves our impact and our partnership capabilities and you’re going to see a lot more of it ahead.

Operator

David Joyce, Seaport Research.

David Joyce Joyce

Thank you very much. Could you please provide some more color on how fill rates are evolving and how the increasing programmatic buying activity and ad tech partnerships and increased industry supply are interplaying there? Thanks.

Charles Collier

This is Charlie, David. It’s all of a piece. So Anthony led with, and it’s so impressive. The entire platform is growing. And in fact, the Roku Channel is growing over 75% year over year. So you can imagine that holds us in great stead to handle both. Pricing fluctuations in the market and demand fluctuations. And then we’re layering these third-party partnerships, not just Trade Desk, but all sorts of third-party partnerships over our advanced data, our scale, and our ability to handle supply.
So fill rates are one metric of our success. But I think what you’re going to see is a steady ramp of demand and a steady ramp of ad revenues into the back half of the year. So it all moves together. And I think we’re pretty uniquely positioned to drive the type of opportunities we’ve been talking about on this call.

David Joyce Joyce

All right. Thank you.

Operator

Okay. At this time, I would now like to turn the call back over to Anthony for closing remarks.

Anthony Wood

All right. Thank you, everyone, for joining, and thanks to our employees, customers, partners, and advertisers.

Operator

This concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for participating. You may now disconnect.