This article was originally published on Forbes on Jan 21, 2021,11:20pm ESTForbes on Jan 21, 2021,11:20pm EST
Netflix came in strong with the recent earnings and there is no reason to expect Roku will not also come in strong especially as Covid and stay-at-home orders have accelerated the shift towards Connected TV.
It's easy to compare Roku's roughly 50 million users to Netflix's 200 million and to assume Roku is a much smaller company or lagging the subscription behemoths, such as Disney Plus. This is a mistake as the ad-based video-on-demand (AVOD) market is a newer market than subscription-video on demand (SVOD). The AVOD market is distinguished from SVOD because it's primary driver is pay-TV ad dollars rather than the cord-cutting trend or subscribers.
About $10 billion is spent on Connected TV ads compared to $70 billion on pay television ads in the United States alone. Pay-TV ad spend is now expected to decline by 15% to $60 billion this year due to the postponement of live sports and also due to an increase in cord-cutting from covid.
Here's something to consider – cord-cutters aren't going back to cable, and this places Pay TV ad budgets in a dilemma. These budgets have not cared much for mobile or desktop. Despite the sheer number of data scientists and (frightening) level of behavioral targeting used by Google and Facebook, Pay TV has held on to an impressive level of ad spend at about $70 billion in 2019 compared to $87 billion on mobile. One reason is that advertising on the television is more effective – no amount of data collection can change the video completion rate achieved when you're sitting in your living room.
Although these budgets have not migrated to mobile or desktop in the past, those advertisers now have an opportunity to use data to personalize the advertising while viewers are in their living rooms. Roku and AVOD are the best of both worlds – combining data for targeting and high completion and viewability rates — and this creates a unique market from SVOD. For reference, completion rates on Connected TV ads are as high as 97% with 100% viewability, according to a study by Benchmark.
Below, I review Netflix's earnings as it's essential to keep an eye on exactly how long a winner can run in the OTT media category. I also review Roku's upcoming earnings and what to look for.
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Review of Netflix Earnings:
Netflix surpassed expectations again in Q4 despite many believing the increase in Disney Plus subscribers and HBO Max would weigh on Netflix's subscriber results.
To be fair, the real test is yet to come as dining out, travel, and return-to-work patterns begin to normalize. Netflix is guiding conservatively for Q1 with 6 million net additions.
Revenue grew 21% YoY to $6.6B, topping consensus estimates by $20M. Net adds of 8.5M came in well ahead of expectations calling for 6M. Netflix now expects 2021 free-cash-flow to be “around break-even” versus previous guidance of -$1B. The company also intends to explore a share repurchase program moving forward:
“Combined with our $8.2B cash balance and our $750M undrawn credit facility, we believe we no longer have a need to raise external financing for our day-to-day operations…As we generate excess cash, we intend to maintain $10B-15B in gross debt and will explore returning cash to shareholders through ongoing stock buybacks, as we did in the past (2007-2011)."
Competition has been one of Wall Street's primary concerns regarding Netflix. In Q4, Netflix maintained a healthy lead over the competition with 29% market share. In Q4 2019, Netflix had 31% share of the streaming market. Keep in mind, the market is growing overall so a smaller percentage can still represent subscriber and revenue growth.
Q4 US Video Streaming: Share By Brand - NIELSEN, CREDIT SUISSE
Despite the modest decline in the share of minutes watched, it is evident that competition did not bite into Netflix’s net adds in 2020.
NETFLIX SHAREHOLDER LETTER
This supports the thesis that other streaming services, namely Disney+, are complementary to Netflix. Netflix just completed its best year in history while Disney+ and other new streaming services became available. Consumer behavior is showing that consumers prefer to have multiple subscription services.
In Q4, Netflix had 57.2M global app downloads versus 53.5M for Disney+. In Q4 '18 and '19, Netflix had 53M and 58M global app downloads, respectively. These numbers indicate that the success of Disney+ is not coming at the expense of Netflix. Instead, Disney+ is a complimentary service helping to further the acceleration of streaming to the TV.
