eMarketer: Roku will have 38.9M MAUs in 2017, up 19% YoY, compared to 36.9M for Chromecast, 35.8M for Amazon Fire TV, and 21.3M for Apple TV
and Apple is well behind them all David Katzmaier / CNET : Roku beats Google, Amazon and Apple with streaming users Dade Hayes / Forbes : Roku Leapfrogs Google In Connected-TV Race: Study Adario Strange / Mashable : Roku is beating Apple TV, Google, Amazon in the battle for your TV attention, study claims Ben Schoon / 9to5Google : Forecasts suggest a continued battle between Chromecast & Roku while no one uses Apple TV See also Mediagazer
Context & Ripple Effects
This eMarketer forecast caps a year of Roku momentum: in July the company reported 15M MAUs, up 43% YoY, with nearly 7B hours streamed over six months — a 61% jump over 2016. The new numbers extend that trajectory to a projected 38.9M MAUs for 2017, putting Roku ahead of both Google's Chromecast (36.9M) and Amazon Fire TV (35.8M).
Apple's position at 21.3M is the endpoint of a longer slide that began when Amazon's Fire TV outsold Apple TV in 2014, dropping it to fourth place. A month after this forecast, share data confirmed the ordering, with Roku holding 37% of US streaming-player share against Fire TV's 24% and Apple TV's 15%.
First-order effects
- Roku enters the fall as the largest streaming platform by active users, giving it the biggest audience to sell to advertisers and to negotiate channel placement with.
- Apple TV's 21.3M base is barely half Roku's forecast total, forcing Apple to justify its premium-priced box on ecosystem integration rather than reach.
Second-order effects
- With three platforms clustered between 35-39M MAUs, Amazon and Google face pressure to differentiate on price and bundled content rather than hardware alone, compressing margins across the category.
- The scale gap pushes publishers and networks to treat Roku as the default launch target, reinforcing its lead through app availability even where rivals match on features.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, value migrates from selling devices to owning the platform layer — the direction later data confirms, as smart TVs surpassed streaming devices in US broadband households by Q1 2020, pushing Roku-style players toward software licensing and ad revenue.
- Attention metrics become the currency: Nielsen's finding that viewers stream nearly 8B hours per month on connected devices means whoever aggregates the hours, not the units sold, controls CTV advertising economics.
The trend: Connected-TV distribution is consolidating around low-cost, ad-monetized platforms like Roku, while premium-priced devices such as Apple TV cede share and the industry's center of gravity shifts from hardware sales to platform ownership.