Roku Q4 2025 Earnings Call - Platform momentum, Ads Manager and subscriptions set a path to >$1B FCF

Conference Call Operator: Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Roku fourth quarter 2025 earnings conference call. At this time, all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speaker’s presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session. To ask a question during the session, you will need to press star one one on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised. To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We ask that you limit yourself to one question only. I would now like to turn the call over to Conrad Grodd, Vice President of Investor Relations. Sir, you may begin.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Good afternoon. Welcome to Roku’s fourth quarter and year-end 2025 earnings call. Joining us on today’s call are Anthony Wood, Roku’s Founder and CEO, Dan Jedda, our CFO and COO, Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, and Mustafa Ozgen, President, Devices. 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 actual 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 2024 period. With that, operator, our first question, please.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, as a reminder, to ask a question, please press star 11 on your telephone, then wait for your name to be announced.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Mm-hmm.

Conference Call Operator: To withdraw your question, please press star one one again. We ask that you limit yourself to one question only. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster. Our first question comes from the line of Shyam Patil with Susquehanna. Your line is open.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Hey, guys. Congrats on the strong 2025 and 2026 outlook. I have a couple of questions. The first one: Can you help us bridge the 1Q revenue outlook of over 21% growth to the full year outlook of about 18% growth? And then I have a follow-up question.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Shyam, this is Anthony. I’ll kick this off and then turn it over to Dan, who can talk more about the outlook. So let me just start by taking a minute to reflect on our execution over the past several years. In 2023, our priority was to rightsize our cost structure and reach Adjusted EBITDA breakeven in 2024, and we achieved that goal a full year ahead of schedule. And this early progress positioned us to invest further in our platform monetization initiatives. As a result, in advertising, we deepened integration with leading demand-side platforms and scaled our measurement and performance capabilities. In subscriptions, Q4 was our biggest quarter ever for premium subscription net adds. We expect to add more tier one partners and roll out bundles this year, and we plan to expand Howdy on Roku and take it to additional platforms.

So these initiatives are paying off for us. You know, we grew platform revenue 18% in 2025, and we accomplished all of this while growing our streaming households, both in the U.S. and globally. Looking ahead to 2026 and beyond, we’re confident in our ability to sustain double-digit platform revenue growth while continuing to grow profitability. So with that introduction, let me turn it over to Dan.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Thanks, Anthony, and thanks for the question. Let me just add a little bit to what Anthony said. Exactly two years ago, when we were entering 2024, we said that now that we rightsized our cost structure, we would relentlessly focus on growing our platform revenue, improving our monetization, and driving profitability, including free cash flow. In Q4, we grew platform revenue over 18%, surpassing $1.2 billion. We achieved Adjusted EBITDA of $169 million and net income of $80 million. All were records for us.

For full year, we also grew our Platform revenue 18%, achieved Adjusted EBITDA of $421 million, which represents a margin expansion of 255 basis points, and we generated free cash flow of $484 million, also a record for us, and over 100% year-over-year growth. With our strong free cash flow, we purchased $150 million of Roku stock through our share buyback program and achieved near 0% dilution for Q4, the lowest dilution we have ever reported. This year, our outlook for Platform revenue growth is more than 21% in Q1 and 18% for full year, as we continue to execute on our monetization initiatives.

Our full-year adjusted EBITDA guidance of $635 million represents over 50% year-over-year growth and margin expansion of 267 basis points to 11.6%. I expect that free cash flow will again be above adjusted EBITDA as we remain CapEx light. It’s also worth noting that we have over $1 billion of a deferred tax asset, which will keep our cash taxes low for many years. I see our free cash flow continuing to be strong and outpacing EBITDA beyond this year. In fact, I see a path to over $1 billion in free cash flow by the end of 2028, if not sooner, which will be a significant milestone for us. We have incredibly strong momentum going into 2026, and our focus is on sustaining growth.

To get to your question specifically on Q1 versus full year, a few factors are shaping our Q1 outlook. First, Q1 last year was our easiest comp at just under 17% year-over-year.

Corey Carpenter, Analyst, JP Morgan: ... Second, Q1 of this year includes the full benefit of Frndly. As you recall, we closed that acquisition in Q2 of last year. And I guess finally, we have stronger visibility into Q1 versus the second half of the year. So as we gain better visibility into political and into H2, we’ll provide updated guidance.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Yeah, thank you for all that color. It was really helpful. I did have a quick follow-up. Can you comment on your retail distribution strategy for 2026, given that Walmart is switching its house TV to Vizio’s operating system?

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Sean, this is Anthony again. Yeah, let me take that. So, you know, as Walmart focuses more on Vizio OS for their house brand, we’re focused on broadening and diversifying our retail distribution. We remain extremely well positioned in the market. With $hundreds of millions a year of investment in distribution, we have flexibility in how we invest this budget, and we’ll continue to optimize this investment across both our retail and our OEM partners. We’re already widely distributed, obviously, including at Walmart, and I’ll share a few examples of how we’re expanding our distribution. At Best Buy, we expanded with the addition of Pioneer Roku TVs, which we recently launched. At Target, we expanded with our Roku-made TVs, and they’re doing extremely well. At regional and national retailers like Amazon, we have expanded our presence.

In addition to retailers, TV OEMs are, you know, key strategic partners for us, and we’ve expanded our licensing and distribution agreements with two of our largest and longest term Roku TV partners, TCL and Hisense, as well as several others. We also have first-party TVs, and for our first-party TVs, we expect sales to increase after shifting our TV production to Mexico, which will help us lower our cost. And then, of course, we expect streaming players to continue to be a meaningful contributor to overall Roku OS distribution. So those are some of the things we’re doing in 2026. You know, this work has started, but we expect to see the impact predominantly in the second half of the year as these cycles take time to scale.

So in addition to this work that I just outlined, I want to take a second and just talk about some of the strategic assets that we have that create a strong foundational competitive advantage for Roku, that are really important. You know, one is, of course, the Roku brand. It’s a brand that consumers love and ask for by name, and it’s resulted in Roku being used in over half of U.S. broadband households. Nearly half of all TV streaming in the U.S. happens on the Roku platform, and, you know, importantly, we’re best in class at monetization, which gives us a lot of flexibility to invest in building scale and distribution. We’re also globally scaled, and we have successful Roku TV partnerships with dozens of TV partners, factories, and retailers.

And then, you know, one of the main ways we’ve achieved our success is with the Roku OS, which is a purpose-built operating system designed specifically for TV. It’s the only purpose-built OS for TV. It has a lot of intrinsic advantages. One of those is the lowest BOM cost in the industry, and one of the reasons for that is we have the lowest memory footprint in the industry. And as everyone knows, memory prices are going up right now. And so as memory prices continue to go up, that’s a cost advantage that accrues to us and keeps growing as memory prices increase.

The number of Roku TV units sold, you know, it may go up or down, you know, from quarter to quarter, but overall, we expect to continue to grow our scale of streaming households in the U.S. and globally, and we’re on track to surpass 100 million streaming households this year.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Great. Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Dan.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Corey Carpenter with JP Morgan. Your line is open.

Corey Carpenter, Analyst, JP Morgan: Hey, good afternoon. So, generative video, the advancements have really caught investors’ attention of late. We saw CDance yesterday, Google Genie, both recent examples. I think one interpretation from this we’re hearing is that it’s likely to significantly increase the amount of content available, perhaps shift time spent more to short-form videos. So Anthony, the question for you really is, I thought it’d be helpful to hear how do you think AI could impact the streaming landscape, and what do you think it means for Roku? Thank you.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Sure. Yeah. I mean, personally, I’m super excited about AI and how it’s gonna impact content specifically. You know, I think to answer your question, let me—I’ll answer your question directly, and then let me talk about some of the, kind of, bigger picture ways that we think about AI generally. So just in terms of content, you know, it’s very clear to me that AI is going to reduce the cost of content significantly over time. And, you know, as content and including long-form content. And as long-form content costs come down, that’s gonna grow engagement on our platform, and we monetize engagement. That’s basically our business model, is monetizing engagement. So, you know, I view it as all very positive for our business.

But if I just take it a level up and think about, you know, how do we think about AI generally and its impact on our business? I’ll, you know, let me start by saying that I think AI is a significant opportunity for Roku. You know, we view it as a powerful tailwind to our business. It’s not a disruptor for us, and we’re integrating it across our entire technology stack. We’re applying AI across our platform to improve discovery, increase engagement, and unlock, you know, major new monetization opportunities. So let me just talk about a few of those. On the viewer experience, AI helps personalize and simplify how people find what to watch... which increases engagement. For example, on our content row, we’re improving recommendations and introducing new features that surface trending content.

On our content details page, we’re using AI to generate why to watch summaries to go beyond just plot overviews. You know, we’ve updated Roku Voice recently. Now, viewers can ask more conversational, entertainment-based questions and get contextual answers directly on their TV screen. So that’s just some examples in the viewer experience. You know, but I would say also, equally important for us is on the advertising side, if not more important. You know, AI is a major driver of opportunity in the advertising side of our business. AI helps us build the most performant connected TV ad platform. AI is opening the entire new market of small and medium-sized businesses, which we’re addressing with Ads Manager. I mean, that’s an entire new segment in the ad business that was not accessible to TV platforms before, but is now because of AI.

AI allows products like Ads Manager to exist, and AI tools make it easier for advertisers to create high-quality video ads. You know, and the easier it is to create video ads, the larger the number of advertisers that can advertise on a TV platform. And then AI is automating workflows that were previously manual, such as reviewing and adapting ad formats. And then finally, we’re using AI internally across the company to drive operational efficiency and productivity. So overall, you know, AI strengthens our platform, it improves monetization, and it enhances the performance of our business overall.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Great. Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Morris with Guggenheim Securities. Your line is open.

Michael Morris, Analyst, Guggenheim Securities: Thank you. Good afternoon. Wanted to ask about how the third-party ad demand partnership that you have with Amazon is impacting the business so far, and how you expect it to progress throughout the year. Is it additive to growth yet, or has it cannibalized revenue in any way as it has come online? And then if I could, just briefly on the platform gross margin, you provided the 51%-52% range for 2026, which is very helpful. What are you expecting for the first quarter, and how much variability do you expect in this, you know, quarter to quarter throughout the year? Thank you.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Michael. Charlie will take your first question on third-party ad, ad demand partnerships.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Great. Thanks, Anthony. Hey, Michael. Look, just stepping back for a second, our strategy has been to be open and interoperable and be deeply integrated with all the DSPs, so really that we can meet clients anywhere they wanna transact. So the Amazon partnership was natural in that context. And really, overall, we strive to be the most performant CTV ad platform in the industry. So I’d say to your question of impact this year, you know, it’s early innings. Amazon’s working hard to bring new clients over to its DSP, and the combination of our Roku OS footprints makes for an impressive offering. To put it in context, you know, over the last year, we’ve added dozens of ad tech partners, Michael, from the Yahoo DSP to AppLovin and Whirl to Magnite.

Then once they’re onboarded, just like with Amazon, we begin deepening our relationships with each of them, and they start to ramp, and that’ll continue, and that’s the case for all of them. You know, our goal with all these partnerships is to drive greater outcomes and greater performance for our marketing partners. We’re bullish about our position, not just as the open, interoperable partner in a marketplace with so many walled gardens, but the ability of this to grow as we deepen the integrations.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Dan, do you wanna-

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Yeah. Let me just add that, in terms of how it will affect the business this year, I’ll add to that, and then I’ll answer your gross margin question. You know, as Charlie said, like, the ramp of Amazon DSP will take time. Obviously, we’re fully integrated. We are ramping. We are on. It’s going as expected, and I think, like, across all the DSPs, we feel very good about how we’re performing on that. Specific to Amazon, as the Amazon DSP grows and becomes and is successful, which we think it will be, we’ll be successful along with it.

It does take time for these to ramp, though, and, we don’t obviously break it out, but again, it’s, it’s tracking as we’d expect, and we expect it to be more of a contribution over time. With respect to platform gross margins, the guide was 51%-52%. For the full year of 2025, we did end at 52%. I’ll, I’ll say that I don’t, I don’t expect a lot of variability from quarter to quarter. It does depend to some extent on the mix of our different activities in the platform business. We saw some stabilization in M&E in Q4, which was great, which helped margins. We’re, we’re tracking, that stability is happening in Q1 as well. We’ll see how M&E goes forward.

We’re liking what we see there, but specifically, I don’t expect a lot of variability. I will say, again, we have a lot of mix, different activities growing at different rates, and it’s not lost on me and us that we don’t give, we don’t break out a lot of detail. One thing we are working on is some more detail on our different activities, and giving you a bit more color into the margin profile, and the different activities and platform. And I hope to share some more data on that next quarter. It’s something we’re working on.

Michael Morris, Analyst, Guggenheim Securities: Thank you. It’s very helpful.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Jason Helfstein with Oppenheimer. Your line is open.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: ... Thanks for taking the question. So in the prepared launch sheet, you kind of alluded to the success you’re seeing with the international viewership and how it’s early days of monetization. I guess, is there a way to, as we think about, like, what the opportunity is relative to, like, the platform business today, back in the, you know, the early days of Netflix, we would be like, "Oh, international, you know, X times potentially bigger than the U.S. opportunity." And then I guess just, just if you want to take a step back, you know, I guess, like, where does that fit in with, you know, where you think the kind of biggest opportunity is in the business? You know, so comparing, let’s say, the international revenue opportunity, advertising to other, other opportunities that, that you’re looking at right now. Thank you.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Hey, Jason, Dan will take that question.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Yeah. So we’ve talked about international, in our focus countries, and we’re at different stages, depending on the country. So let me just give you some examples of this. So, for example, in Canada and in Mexico, we actually have scale, and we’re starting to monetize that more. In Mexico, we have incredible scale, and we’re really starting to focus on the monetization side of that, of our strategy. In Brazil, where the ad market isn’t quite there yet, we’re still building scale. That’s a little bit farther off in terms of focus on the monetization. So we’re very focused on building scale and making great progress into Brazil and the rest of Latin America. We’re making progress on the UK.

But the monetization is really starting to take hold in Mexico and Canada for slightly different reasons. In Canada, the market’s very good from a digital perspective. Our ARPU is actually quite strong in Canada. We’re growing our streaming households and our ARPU along with it, and so we like what we see there. In Mexico, the ad market hasn’t shifted to digital like it has in the US, although we expect that to happen over time. So we have incredible scale in Mexico. It actually rivals the US in terms of scale in Mexico, which is great. We’re really starting to focus on monetization of subscriptions and advertising across all our international locations.

So for example, we launched premium subscriptions in Mexico recently, and will likely launch more countries over time. So we’re very focused not just on advertising, but on leveraging our amazing subscription business in our international countries, and we like what we see there. That is also an opportunity, and over time, I do believe that international will become a larger percent of our overall platform revenue. But it’s still pretty early on, so there’s a lot of room to grow in these international locations.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: How would you rank that relative to, like, the opportunities you’re looking at now that, you know, for growth? Like, is it, is this number one?

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: You mean relative to the U.S.?

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: No, relative to U.S. or just other things you’re looking at... from here.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Well, the international is an incredible opportunity for us to grow. I mean, like I said, subscriptions alone is a big opportunity. The Roku Channel is doing very well in our international locations. Engagement is growing very well. You know, in Brazil, where we have scale, we recently launched FAST, which is doing very well. So I think it’s a big opportunity. The question is, how do the digital ad markets migrate over? And that is a country by country specific situation. But subscriptions, including, for example, Howdy, can grow really well in these locations, and that’s a really big opportunity for us.

Jason Helfstein, Analyst, Oppenheimer: Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Steven Cahall, with Wells Fargo. Your line is open.

Steven Cahall, Analyst, Wells Fargo: Thanks. Dan, just following up on the platform guide in the first quarter. I don’t know how much kind of political or Frndly is in, both the current Q1 and the prior Q1, but it seems like there is a little bit of a deceleration in kind of same store sales in, in platform from Q4 to Q1, and the comp is slightly easier. Just wanted to know if that’s conservatism, is there some natural deceleration because you’ve gotten to such big scale, or, or am I doing the math wrong there? And then also, if we just think about your, revenue and platform outlook for 2026, just curious how you’re thinking about the contribution of political dollars in there. You know, I think you did about $90 million in 2024.

That kind of came out of nowhere, so wondering what you’re thinking for 2026. Thanks.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Yeah, thanks for the question, Steven. To the point, first of all, Q1 doesn’t have a lot of political in it, in general, so I wouldn’t say that’s an impact for Q1, although it will be impactful in H2. Yes, Frndly is impactful for Q1, and that does add a couple of points. With respect to Q1 versus H2, or Q1 versus the full year, you know, to the answer I gave in my first question, we just have a lot more visibility into Q1, and so we’re waiting to see how political shapes up, how the spending shapes up. I do believe that if the market is similar in the midterms versus the general, like, we will do well in that market.

Charlie and team have built out, you know, a very good, strong political sales funnel. We’re very good at targeting. We’re a great platform of which to advertise on. So again, like, it’s just a question of having more visibility right now in Q1 versus H2, and how political will transpire, and we’ll update you as we go forward. So yes, I would agree with the comment that the back half is a little bit more conservative, just given how, you know, how much visibility we have into Q1.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: ... Thanks.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham. Your line is open.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku0: Hey, congratulations on really great numbers. I want to follow up on one of the Gen AI questions asked earlier. So Netflix is telling us that they are going to put short-form video and user-generated content on their platform because they think engagement is what they are solving for. Anthony, you just said something similar in an earlier question, that engagement is your, like, North Star. However, I think one of the reasons you get so many really high-quality brand advertisers is that you’re top of funnel premium-only video. So how do you think from a judgment point of view of balancing in driving engagement, which would mean vertical video and adding user-generated content, even short form, compared with protecting your ad environment so that you continue to get high-quality advertisers? That’s my first question.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Yeah, let me- I’ll give you my opinion, then I’ll turn and see if Charlie has anything to add. You know, we do have short-form content on our platform. We’re always experimenting, you know, with different kinds of short form and how to place it in our UI. There’s lots of ways we drive engagement on our platform, you know, mostly around our user interface and the personalization of the experience, but also around the content that’s on the platform. You know, I think that... I mean, as a platform, we’re a big screen TV platform primarily, and that does mean generally long-form content. That’s generally what gets consumed. So, although we do have some shorter-form video, and I’m sure that’ll grow, our focus really is on long-form video. That’s what people generally look for when they turn on their TV.

I mean, I strongly believe that as content costs come down, that’s gonna, you know, when you lower the cost of something, people consume more of it. And so we’ll see more engagement of long-form video, and that’s a big opportunity for us as a platform. You know, in terms of advertisers, I’ll ask Charlie to take that question.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Sure. Hey, Laura, it’s a good question. One thing I think we have a few real advantages. One is, our fast channel environment has been really powerful. And so, for example, Mr. Beast launched his own fast channel, and it premiered on Roku. And because of our scale, of course, that did really well, and we got to see the type of viewers who consume that content. And that last point is really one of our advantages. We really do understand the cohorts of viewers, and one of the things we’ve been able to do is curate content around different interests. And I think, as we get more into short form, when we do, as Anthony said, we do it against specific cohorts and really try to super serve audiences that we understand.

We are known for premium content, and in the foreseeable future, it’s going to be the majority of what we do and, and do well. But I, I very much like the ability of our platform to sort of figure out what, the viewer wants to watch and how. Some of the examples of that, beyond just the content creators you might be thinking about, are even in places like our Sports Zone, where we’ll do shoulder content. They’ll go in to watch the game, they’ll get short-form clips, they’ll get short form, you know, commentary and other information, and we do that with the league. So there’s all sorts of ways you can do it, and, and Roku’s really good at putting it in context.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku0: Super helpful. My second question is on upfront versus SMBs. It’s a similar judgment question, which is, a lot of the letter is talking about your investments in Ads Manager and your focus on SMBs, because it is a large market. But what we hear from Mountain, which is 100% performance CTV, is that those types of advertisers are really 100% focused on performance, like, within three days, like, super short-term performance. And my recollection is you guys do more than $1 billion in upfront guarantees, which is like a quarter of your total revenue. So as you think about investing in this bottom-of-funnel, making yourself a full funnel CTV, option for advertising, over time, do you think you’re going to pivot from, like, towards the more performance-oriented, which I would think would have lower margins than top of funnel?

Correct me if you think I’m wrong on that thinking. Thank you.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Sure, Laura, this is Charlie again. I think it’s sort of different horses for different courses. So let me tell you what I mean by that. Yeah, we do a lot of guaranteed business at the top of the funnel with enterprise clients, and they, by the way, and I believe they’re performant too. They measure perhaps different things, and as you said, conversion in a few days. But the shift to performance marketing and the opening of our platform to small and medium-sized businesses is absolutely a tailwind, but we can manage it in a very different way. You know, we’ve talked a lot in past calls about how unique our situation is as a platform, which is that we can price up and down the pricing curve and the demand curve.

I think, in that context, you’ll see us manage very well the opportunity to both perform and to serve the high-end clients. One way to break this out for you is the way we price our inventory. You know, you’ll have specific units and opportunities at the high end of the pricing curve. You know, our sponsorships, our Roku Originals, our sports, our home screen units, or anytime we do a deep digital integration, that’s, you know, that comes with a price tag because of exactly what those are.

And then on the other end of the business, and this might be some of the business that you’re picturing when you ask the question, you’ve got some advertisers who have different needs, who are, you know, priced at a much lower price point, but they certainly don’t get inventory with the same quality signal. They don’t get certainly any of the unique units or sponsorships that I was talking about on the other end. So look, you know, we are the largest CTV footprint, and we have really ways to expand our inventory thoughtfully as we grow.

So I think our ability to price up and down the demand curve allows us to not just do well in the current CTV landscape, but as we push to be the most performant CTV platform and welcome in small and medium-sized businesses. You know, they will spend $600 billion on advertising this year in small, medium-sized businesses, and if the enterprise trend is any indication, you combine the, you know, the visual impact of television with the performance of digital, and Roku Ad Manager, I think, is uniquely positioned to lead in that transition, and we’ll price it properly at both ends of the curve.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: This is Anthony. Let me just add. I’ll just-

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Go ahead.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Yeah, I’ll just add a few comments. I think, you know, just generally, we’re hearing from all of our advertisers, both traditional, high, top-of-the-funnel brand advertisers, all the way to lower funnel advertisers, of which we have a whole range, that they’re all focused on performance. And it’s a key strategy for us to be the most performant connected CE platform in the industry. And we’re putting a lot of effort into that, and we’re integrating a lot of generative AI technology to help us achieve that. And it’s going well. And you can see... I mean, in early days, but, you know, Roku Ads Manager is doing extremely well, and we’re seeing strong growth, and so that strategy is working for us. So there, the whole advertising business is moving to performance.

You know, different advertisers have different definitions of how they’re measuring performance and what they’re looking for. You know, it’s not all the same as, like, a traditional social media advertiser-type performance, but it is moving more and more into performance. You know, results are being measured, and, and we’re seeing it, it’s working. Like, we’re seeing those advertisers start to move over.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Yeah, I think I’ll just add on one more thing. Great, Laura, to your point, I do think it’s important to understand that I agree with everything Charlie and Anthony said, but your comment on the pivot towards lower margin, more performant ads, they’re not lower margin for us. We are very—it’s not, it’s not where like a performant-based ad that is focused on a site visit, that’s focused on a ROAS ad, that’s focused on a click. They’re not lower margin for us in this area. So you should not think that as we focus on the SMBs, that it drags down margins. It does not.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Thanks, guys. Very helpful.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Thank you.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Rob Sanderson with Loop Capital. Your line is open.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku1: Oh, thank you for the opportunity. I wanted to ask a little bit about just expanding your advertising opportunity on the home screen outside of M&E and into the much larger, advertising landscape. You know, I’m sure there’s lots of interesting things you can do here, but any color on, the types of ad formats you might be thinking about? It’s something that we’re likely to learn more about through 2026. And then on, just thoughts on go-to-market. You know, these would be completely unique and probably require some education of the advertisers, maybe not something that third party demand partners could help you with. Is that something that you think you’d have to take on a direct basis, or anything you can sort of share on, go-to-market?

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Rob, Charlie will take that question.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Yeah, sure. Well, it’s happening already, Rob. It’s a great question, and we’ve expanded well beyond M&E over the last couple of years. Actually, I think if you saw the home screen or you’re looking at the home screen right now, Roku City, which is our, you know, beloved interactive world, that is living inside your television. You know, right now, if you look at it, it’s got the Olympics on it, and some of our sponsors, you know, actually, I think most of which are not M&E at all. We also added video to the home screen inside of our marquee unit, which is a big unit on the right-hand side of the screen, and that is, you know, really performing well for all sorts of categories beyond M&E.

So we are testing, you know, several variations of home screen design, and, you know, we’re obviously proving that it drives more engagement and viewer satisfaction, which is, but you’re gonna see us do a lot of it. And as to your question about whether it’s programmatic, to date, it is not. You know, there are lots of reasons. We got a question earlier about upfront versus SMB. Obviously, with our enterprise clients and our advertising agencies, they are very focused on these unique units and these performant units, and you’ll see more of it moving forward.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Rob, this is Anthony again. I’ll just, in terms of new ad units, you know, we’ve mentioned before that we have a new home screen design that we’re working on. It’s one of our major initiatives. It’s in testing right now. You know, and we’re testing several different variations of the home screen. It’s going well. We’re striving more engagement and viewer satisfaction. We believe it’ll increase monetization over time, you know, whether that’s getting viewers to sign up for subscriptions or watch more ad-supported content, and we hope to roll it out sometime this year. But the new home screen, I’ll just say that the new home screen, one, it’s got a lot of improvements. One of the, one of the changes is we’re testing new types of ad units, and we’re also looking hard at how we can...

We’re testing different ways to increase, you know, impressions of current ad units and also increase click-through of current ad units as well.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku1: Thank you, Anthony. Thank you, Charlie.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Thanks.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Vikram with Baird. Your line is open.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku2: ... Yeah, hi. Thanks for taking the question. I wanted to ask about the Howdy launch as well as the Frndly acquisition. Could you talk more about how each of those integrations is going so far, and what are your plans for those businesses in 2026? Thanks.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Vikram, this is Anthony. Both of those are going well. You know, we haven’t broken out numbers, but—like, I’m extremely happy with how the Howdy launch is going. You know, subscribers are continuing to grow nicely. And, you know, I’ll just say that for those that don’t know, Howdy and Frndly, they’re part of Roku’s portfolio of owned and operated services, which started with The Roku Channel. And adding Howdy and Frndly is a strategic expansion into subscriptions that’s gonna add incremental revenue. We’re using the power of our platform, you know, our user experience to drive engagement in both of those. We’re seeing increased engagement on both of them. I mean, we’re definitely increasing engagement and signups for Frndly since we took over that service.

Of course, that platform is how we’re launching and growing the Howdy business. You know, we have plans. Frndly is already available on platforms outside of Roku, and we have plans to launch Howdy on platforms off of Roku as well. So I mean, I think I’m very excited about both of them, and Howdy in particular, I think, has the opportunity, the potential, you know, over time, to become a very large service for us.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku2: Okay, thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Matt Condon with Citizens Bank. Your line is open.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku3: Thank you so much for taking my question. I just wanted to ask, as Netflix is, you know, pending the acquisition of Warner Bros., and this is changing, potentially, just the, the broader streaming landscape, can you just talk about if they become more guarded about how to distribute their content, how this could potentially impact Roku, both on the advertising side and the subscription side? And then maybe just a quick follow-up, Dan, just mid-single digit OPEX growth going forward, is that the right way to continue to think about this? And if revenue growth comes in above expectations, how do you just think about reinvesting some of that growth back into the business? Thank you so much.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Matt, this is Anthony. I’ll just say, you know, in the US, as we’ve said before, we’re in more than half of broadband households, and half of all TV streaming happens on the Roku platform. I mean, that’s a lot of scale. This makes us an essential partner to every content owner and streaming service, and we don’t anticipate that changing regardless of how the industry consolidates, consolidates or how that consolidation plays out. In any scenario, the streaming sector remains extremely robust. It’s continuing to grow quite nicely, and we remain well positioned to help our streaming and content partners drive engagement, find viewers and sign up customers. I’ll let Dan take the question on.

Dan Jedda, CFO and COO, Roku: Yeah, thanks for the question, Matt. With respect to OPEX, you know, we remain focused on execution and operational discipline, ensuring we invest where we see the highest returns. We grew our OPEX 3% in 2025, a little bit lower than I expected, which is fine because we’re investing well in all these initiatives that we’ve laid out here, both in the shareholder letter and what we’ve talked about on this Q&A. I do expect our OPEX to grow in that mid-single digits. As we’ve said many times, we expect our platform revenue to grow double digits. I think I’ve gave some pretty concise guidance on gross margin, where we don’t expect any major decel in gross margin.

In fact, we expect it to stay in this 51%-52%, and that will translate into improved EBITDA margins over time. It’s also one of the reasons why I feel like we’re on a good path to achieving $1 billion in free cash flow by 2028. So, and all this is to say we are absolutely investing. We’re adding headcount, mostly on the engineering side, to invest in these incredible initiatives that we have in front of us. So a lot, lot of good things happening. I think it’s also one thing I will say that’s helping our OPEX growth is our SBC continues to come down. We’ve done a lot of work in SBC, and that is actually trending going backwards.

From 2025 into 2026, our guide contemplate that, and that’s one of the things that’s helping our OPEX stay in that mid-single digit range.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku3: Thank you.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Please stand by for our next question. Our next question comes from the line of Tom Champion with Piper Sandler. Your line is open.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Good afternoon, guys. We can see from your discussion around 2026 expectations, you know, pretty solid top line revenue guidance. But I think you’ve been sort of indicating that you see a path for a very solid multi-year CAGR in revenue growth. And you’ve talked about some of the near-term drivers, but I’m just wondering if you could talk a little bit about maybe more intermediate or longer-term dynamics in the business that would give you confidence in sort of a solid growth trajectory beyond this year in 2026. Any thoughts would be welcome. And then you know, maybe for Dan, just a clarification: Is it $250 that remains on the buyback?

Thank you. This is Anthony. I’ll start and then turn it over to Dan. You know, in terms of what’s driving our growth, you know, our two big businesses are advertising and subscriptions, and they’re both doing nicely. So on the advertising side, you know, we’ve talked about deepening our relationship with third-party DSPs and partners. There’s still room to continue to do that. You know, there’s still a lot of ad dollars that is in the traditional linear ecosystem that’s still moving to streaming. You know, we’re taking, I would say, more than our fair share of those dollars, so we’re continuing to see growth there.

We’re having initiatives in place like our new home screen that we’re launching, which I think will grow, which I believe will grow monetization over time based on the testing results I’m seeing. So, and then on subscriptions, you know, one of the big trends in the industry that we’re seeing is aggregation of streaming services. You know, I think increasingly over time, it’s only gonna be a small number of services that can maintain a profitable app, and that a much more profitable way to distribute a streaming service will be through something like Roku’s Premium Subscriptions, and that’s one of the reasons we’re seeing every major streaming service other than the top few sign up to be a participant in Premium Subscriptions, ’cause it’s just good economics. It drives more subscribers on a more economical basis.

And I think so I think premium subscriptions are gonna be a big growth driver and a big secular trend in the industry for quite some time. You know, things like Ads Manager are opening up huge new ad markets for us that just were not available to TVs before. Those new markets are now accessible because of AI, essentially AI, that can create video very quickly or instantaneously at very low cost, and then provide the targeting, and then provide the, you know, granular, self-serve, you know, capabilities that open up to a large number of advertisers. So those are some of the areas we’re working on. And you know, there’s others, there’s other activities and research projects that we have in place that we haven’t disclosed yet.

So, there’s just a lot of opportunity in the streaming space, and there’s a lot of ways to continue to grow monetization on our platform, as well as obviously, we’re gonna continue to grow the scale of our platform, both outside the U.S. and inside the U.S. I don’t know, Dan, did you have anything?

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Yeah. I’ll answer the second part of your question. We purchased $50 million in Q3 and $100 million in Q4, so yes, there’s $250 million remaining on the buyback. I will say, like, as we noted in the shareholder letter, we see a clear path to offsetting dilution for FY 2026. And we have very strong free cash flow, as our guide contemplates of the $635 million of Adjusted EBITDA, and my comments with respect to we believe free cash flow will be above Adjusted EBITDA for the year.

Shyam Patil, Analyst, Susquehanna: Thanks a lot, guys.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Robert Kulbert with Epico RSI. Your line is open.

Speaker 4: Great, thank you very much for taking our questions. Just wanted to go back to Ads Manager, maybe, for another follow-up. Can you talk about maybe the performance orientation or some of the ways that, you know, the product is different from One View? Or did you use One View as a base and try to sort of bake more performance into the platform? Just anything you could tell us about, you know, the starting point for Ads Manager and, you know, how you’re attempting to serve the needs of performance-based advertisers.

And then secondly there, if you could talk a little bit more about maybe the go-to-market for how you identify your high-value SMB prospects, how you reach out to them, how you onboard them or, or, you know, get them into the funnel and then, you know, onboard them into the platform. Anything more you could tell us about that would be really helpful. Thank you.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: Hey, Robert, this is Anthony. I’ll take the first part and then turn it over to Charlie for the second part. You know, I’ll just say, well, first of all, One View was a technology platform, but it was also a business strategy, and I would say the business strategy is what’s changed. So the One View technology is still integrated throughout our platform, and pieces of it are in Roku Ads Manager, for example, as well as a lot of homegrown technology as well. You know, our ad stack wasn’t just One View, but that was a piece of it. But One View was really a strategy around us making that essentially our exclusive DSP on our platform.

That changed a few years ago to, like, we’re not gonna have One View be the DSP on our platform. We’re gonna work with all the large DSPs that are out there, that customers are using and want to continue using. So that’s when we completely switched our strategy to working with third-party partners. That’s when we started deeper integration with Trade Desk, with Amazon, with all the other partners that are out there that we work with, third-party platforms. So, you know, that was really a strategy change, I would say, and that strategy change has been extremely effective, like, that’s working well for us. And I’ll, I don’t know, Charlie, do you want to take the second part or add to that?

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Yeah. Well, it’s a very different sales funnel, obviously, than going to the agencies and clients the way we do with enterprise. I’ll say from my career, it is such a joy to be able to serve top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, and bottom of the funnel. And it is really the bottom of the funnel that we’re working on with the Ads Manager product. Driving it all, to your point about outcomes, driving it all is really just trying to prove performance. And Anthony said earlier in the call, and it’s spot on, really, people define performance in very different ways. And so we’ve announced a bunch of partnerships, for example, iSpot, AppsFlyer, Incremental, and each of them, in one way or another, is about measurement of performance.

And so, you know, I won’t go deep into how we identify the high-value SMB prospects, except to say, you know, we, we’ve created a very different sales force and sales approach. We do a lot of lead gen. We market into this group. And, and then the best advertising for this is actually the performance itself. Because unlike our enterprise clients who come in with budgets, when this works, people will leave it on and continue to come back to Ads Manager for more.

So in the letter, and actually in the recording right before the call, you heard about, you know, a client with specific objectives, who came in, saw the return on ad spend, and then not only do they continue to come back, but we, we see a lot of performance lead to other advertisers in the category doing the same. So really, in many ways, it’s the purest form of advertising because you, you, you know, you invest, we tweak and optimize results and outcomes, and then, we prove performance and, and then we become good partners. And so I, I’m very excited about the ramp of this. I think we can move from going hundreds to thousands to tens of thousands of advertisers.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: This is Anthony, and I’ll just say one other point, which is that, although Ads Manager is doing well for us, we’re—it’s not exclusive. Like, we are working-

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Okay.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: with other third-party partners that are targeting the same, the same target customers, the same SMBs. You know, TV Scientific, for example, is just one. But I do think that there are some significant competitive advantages to building our own self-serve platform, in terms of integrating it more deeply into our platform, that will result in better performance when... And so I think that one of the reasons we’re doing it ourselves is we think we can build a better product by integrating it ourselves into our platform.

Charlie Collier, President, Roku Media, Roku: Got it. Thank you very much.

Conference Call Operator: Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, in the interest of time, I would now like to turn the call back to CEO Anthony Wood for closing remarks.

Anthony Wood, Founder and CEO, Roku: I’d just like to thank our employees, customers, and advertisers, and content partners, and thank you for listening.

Conference Call Operator: Ladies and gentlemen, that concludes today’s conference call. Thank you for your participation. You may now disconnect.