How Roku Serves Niche OTT Services
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Nicole Fencel: Roku as a platform is a great resource for niche services and large services alike. Our job is to make sure our users are able to find the content that they want as quickly as they want, and also to present them with new discovery opportunities. To find that piece of content that they maybe didn't know that they wanted with the first-party data that we have, we're able to help our advertisers and our partners target the right audiences. And I think that's a big benefit of Roku more broadly. I know content is king, but if people can't find the content, then it's kind of a moot point.
That's where I think Roku really comes to play both for the platform side, but also the Roku Channel side. On the Roku channel side, we have over 175 distributors of our ad supported content we have around 50 or so subscription services within our environment. We're trying to create a destination for users, whether they want to subscribe to something or lean back and watch something on our FAST channels or tune into some of the great Quibi content or original content that we now have. on top of working with the overall platform to help users find things like a BritBox or a Disney+, or the Italian basketball leagues. That is our job. We take that very seriously, and as more users cut the cord and more users come over to OTT--and some for the first time--we really have to be focused on how we help them find the content that they got in one format and are now seeking on the streaming platform.
Chris Pfaff: I think I'm not alone, as a Roku user, when I say that in the past 17-18 months I'm using it more to discover and in ways that I wasn't doing before. But let's stay with you for a second, Nicole, because I want you to talk a bit more about the Roku originals. You guys have just come from one position and then leapfrogged into being a massive major player in new original content, which was not the case necessarily before. There are a lot of other channels that we could mention that are doing the same in terms of growing their audiences. But talk to that, because I think that's always a huge driver. And I'm sure it's the same with you.
Nicole Fencel: It's really about finding the right audience for this content. And we think that we really did that by taking this great content that is created for a different device and bringing it to the OTT lean-back experience that really accelerated the growth and viewership of that content and certainly brings in more users to the Roku channel. And just going back to that, that flywheel concept that I talked about earlier--you have to get users in the door and you can use a piece of original content to do that. But you have to do more than that. You can't just get them in for one piece of content. Your job is to keep them engaged and to showcase the depth of your library, whether that's another piece of ad-supported content, whether that's a FAST channel, whether that's a subscription service, our job is to make sure that they stay within our ecosystem and that they find value in that.
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