Rebecca Day

FuboTV reported 43,000 Q1 sequential net subscriber additions to 590,430 vs. a loss of 28,000 in the largely pre-COVID-19 pandemic year-ago quarter, as the company is positive on bundles for virtual MVPDs like itself. Revenue rose 135% year on year to $119.7 million. Churn fell and it raised forecasts. CEO David Gandler cited to investors Tuesday personalization features, better onboarding and improved targeting. NFL recent carriage deals with major broadcasters and by extension vMVPDs is good for the packages' future, Gandler said: Increasing subscription VOD choices mean the streaming experience becomes more “costly and fractured.” Consumers who care about sports and live TV want aggregation in a “seamless, curated” experience, he said: The bundle “will undergo a revival, and we’ll see a major shift back to aggregation and bundling as individual services begin to raise prices” and it becomes more burdensome to manage numerous services. The stock closed up 9.7% Wednesday at $19.38.

The “unfortunate Covid situation was anything but” for connected TV and Roku, Pivotal Research Group's Jeffrey Wlodarczak wrote investors Friday after Q1 revenue rose 79% year on year to $574.2 million. The pandemic accelerated direct-to-consumer streaming video subscriptions “while simultaneously delaying the launch of competitive products to the point that this appears to be arguably a two horse race between Amazon and Roku,” the analyst said. Roku added 2.4 million incremental active accounts, reaching 53.6 million total. Streaming hours grew 1.4 billion to 18.3 billion. Roku expects 2021 streaming hours per account higher than in 2020, said Chief Financial Officer Steve Louden on a Thursday call. The stock closed Friday up 12% at $317.

Xperi’s Q1 revenue of $221.6 million included $98 million in IP revenue, with 30% from media IP, said CEO Jon Kirchner on a Wednesday call. The increase in media IP revenue reflects a “step-up” in baseline IP receipts from a Comcast license, and “significant momentum” in license renewals with companies including Cox, Sony and TCL, Kirchner said. Xperi renewed a pact with Frontier, he said. Content is key to growing the Imax Enhanced ecosystem, said Kirchner. Subscriber churn in pay TV contributed to a 13% decline in product revenue , said Kirchner. In Consumer Experience, revenue was $51.3 million, down 19% year over year. Pay-TV revenue fell 16% to $52.3 million and declined 6% sequentially due to subscriber churn “consistent with industry trends and a shift in revenue allocated under our customer contract in favor of the IP business,” Kirchner said. Xperi expects subscriber declines in its legacy business to be partially offset by increasing average revenue per users as the business shifts to IPTV. Demand for the TiVo IPTV service grew 100% on a “small, but rapidly growing base.”

IRobot raised 2021 guidance Tuesday even as CEO Colin Angle cautioned on a quarterly call that it's "early in the year." The pandemic “continues to weigh heavily on the macroeconomic landscape and limit our visibility," he said. IRobot is challenged by the semiconductor shortage, and some component suppliers recently notified it of “potential volume limitations,” Angle said. The company is “grappling with rising costs for raw materials,” including resins that are up 50% in some situations, said Angle in Q&A; costs are higher in freight and transportation, too. Elevated costs are expected to extend through the next several months, reverting “over time” to “more normalized levels as market forces adjust.” Others also are grappling with chip issues (see 2104230052). On the “huge shift” to e-commerce during the coronavirus crisis, the executive said trends continued in Q1, with 56% of revenue coming from digital sales vs. 40% in 2019. He believes brick-and-mortar sales could “come back a bit” but not to 2019 levels when the split was 60/40. Q1 revenue grew 58% to $303.3 million. The stock closed 7.5% lower at $96.17. See Q1 materials here.

Warner Music Group is looking past the pandemic at virtual opportunities, executives told investors Tuesday. Music is “broadening and deepening its relationship to people everywhere,” said CEO Steve Cooper, citing opportunities via a “snippet” on social media, soundtracks to an in-home workout, live performances in a metaverse and nun-fungible token (NFT) collectibles. The company announced an investment in virtual entertainment company Wave Monday. Three years ago, emerging forms of streaming had zero revenue, said Chief Financial Officer Eric Levin. A quarter ago, the revenue was about $150 million on an annualized basis; now it's $200 million. Emerging areas are "growing rapidly and growing more diverse." They expand monetization available via smartphones, Levin said. The total available market is the smartphone universe, said the CFO. “Here, your TAM is your smartphone universe, but you potentially have multiple touchpoints and therefore multiple opportunities to monetize this music within one smartphone.” One user could use social media, have livestreams, participate in games in metaverses with avatars and collect NFTs. WMG sales grew 17% in the quarter ended March 31 from a year earlier. Artist services and expanded-rights revenue grew 2.6%, reflecting COVID-19’s impact on live events. Other WMG units had bigger growth. Shares closed down 5.7% at $36.09.

Amazon Q1 revenue grew 44% to $108.5 billion from the year-ago quarter, exceeding the high end of the guidance range. Profit was $8.1 billion, vs. $2.5 billion. CEO Jeff Bezos said Amazon Prime Video and Amazon Web Services are “growing up fast and coming into their own.” More than 175 million Prime members streamed videos in the quarter, up 70%. AWS has become a $54 billion annual run rate business, Bezos said. On a Thursday earnings call, Chief Financial Officer Brian Olsavsky said many businesses turned to the AWS cloud during the pandemic rather than investing in their own technology infrastructure, a trend the company expects to continue. Amazon Prime Day is moving to Q2, Olsavsky said. Prime members reached 200 million in Q1. Amazon has benefited from the pandemic “more than any other company in the world,” Wedbush's Michael Pachter wrote investors Friday. Over 60% of Americans are paid Prime members, said the analyst.

Emerald expects full resumption of its trade show calendar beginning in summer, CEO Herve Sedky told a Friday Q1 call, citing the tens of millions of Americans who have been vaccinated and announcements of states reopening, including Nevada, California and New York. Florida and Texas are “fully open for business,” he noted. The outlook for attendance “remains uncertain and could well be challenged near-term, even for events we do stage with a lingering impact of COVID-19,” said Sedky, though the company is encouraged by events in Asia where recovery “seems further along.” The company’s focus is “to ensure that we stage successful shows for customers” and provide “a safe environment,” Sedky said. CEDIA Expo is scheduled Sept. 1-3 at the Indiana Convention Center in Indianapolis (see our calendar here). Emerald has canceled 108 events due to the pandemic.

The nascent overall audio streaming market will grow to $200 billion by 2030, said Spotify CEO Daniel Ek Wednesday. On the number of music services competing in live audio, Ek said he expects it to be a feature that most major platforms will have, comparing live audio to stories on platforms such as Instagram and Snap: It’s a "compelling feature set" that he believes artists will tap into. The U.S., meanwhile, joins other markets where Spotify has announced subscription price increases. The family plan is moving to $16 a month from $15 Friday. Spotify shares closed down 12% at $256.84 Wednesday following the company’s Q1 letter showing monthly average user growth “modestly below” internal expectations. Total monthly average users grew 24% year on year in Q1 to 356 million. Average revenue per user for paid subscribers was 7% lower year on year to $4.98.

Samsung highlighted 5G, Wi-Fi 6 and custom Bluetooth connectivity in the “next evolution of the PC” during its virtual event Wednesday. TM Roh, head of Samsung Electronics' mobile communications business, called this a “reinvention of the PC” -- laptops with the “mobile DNA of a Samsung Galaxy smartphone.” At the core was the question, “Why can’t laptops be more like smartphones?” said Roh, citing mobility, connectivity and “seamless integration” with other devices, along with instant-on operation and lightweight designs. Roh said there was “open collaboration” with Intel and Microsoft. The Galaxy Book Pro series is the first integration of Samsung's SmartThings smart home technology into PCs, it said.

TiVo’s Stream 4K was the only streaming player out of 18 devices in a recent Consumer Reports rating that didn’t encrypt data it sent out, said the organization Monday. User information -- such as SSID, city and state, and longitude and latitude coordinates that could be used to pinpoint a street address -- were exposed, said CR, which notified TiVo. The Xperi-owned company “quickly agreed to fix the problem,” it said. TiVo attributed the weakness to a third-party app’s “transmission of certain data.” CR found the TiVo Edge DVR also was sending unencrypted data, but information didn’t include user data such as IP addresses, and CR didn’t see it as a risk to consumers. The TiVo Stream 4K flaw could leave users open to security vulnerabilities such as a malicious app that has access to a user’s network, CR said: An attacker could use the information, along with other valuable data, to create “an even more invasive attack.” TiVo fixed the problem by the end of March, a company spokesperson told us Tuesday: "We take consumer privacy very seriously and acted as quickly as we could -- pushing the fixes out to the affected devices."