Report: Roku's market share among streaming media players in US is up to 37%, with Amazon's Fire TV at 24%, Chromecast at 18%, and Apple TV down to 15%
Roku isn't only maintaining its lead as the top streaming media player device in the U.S., it's increasing it.
Context & Ripple Effects
This report lands two weeks after eMarketer forecast 38.9M Roku monthly active users for 2017 and days after Roku disclosed 15M MAUs with streaming hours up 61% year over year — together they show Roku converting engagement growth into durable device-share leadership rather than just user counts.
The share table also marks where each rival stands: Amazon's Fire TV holds a clear second at 24%, Chromecast sits mid-pack at 18%, and Apple TV has slipped to last among the four named platforms — a gap that later coverage of smart TVs overtaking standalone streaming devices would make even more consequential.
First-order effects
- Apple TV's drop to 15% puts its premium-priced box behind all three rivals in US living rooms, weakening its position as a content-distribution endpoint.
- Amazon's Fire TV at 24% confirms a stable two-horse race at the top, with Roku extending rather than merely defending its lead.
Second-order effects
- With box share hardening, the battleground shifts from hardware sales to who controls the interface and default placement on the screen — pushing Amazon and Apple toward their own platform strategies rather than accessory positioning.
- Chromecast's dongle-first model, stuck at 18%, faces pressure to add an on-screen OS experience or cede the remote-control real estate that drives app discovery.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, standalone-player share becomes a leading indicator for the TV operating-system market — the path Roku itself took when Roku OS-powered smart TVs reached 38% US share in 2020 — turning device makers into OS licensors.
- As smart TVs surpassed streaming devices in US broadband households by Q1 2020, the structural prize moves from selling boxes to embedding the platform inside every new television set.
The trend: US streaming is consolidating around a few licensed TV operating systems, with Roku's device-share lead foreshadowing its expansion from boxes into the televisions themselves.