Roku, Inc.

Roku, Inc.

138.10
EUR
+0.24
(+0.17%)
2.05EPS
56.99P/E
17.70BMarket Cap
Nov 02Next Earn

Q1 FY2026 · Earnings Call TranscriptApril 30, 2026

Operator

Hello, and thank you for standing by. Welcome to Roku first quarter 2026 earnings conference call.

At this time all participants are in a listen-only mode. After the speakers' presentation, there will be a question-and-answer session.

To ask a question during the session, you will need to press *11 on your telephone. You will then hear an automated message advising your hand is raised.

To withdraw your question, please press *11 again. I would now like to hand the conference over to Conrad Grodd, Vice President, Investor Relations.

You may begin.

Conrad Grodd

Good afternoon. Welcome to Roku's first quarter 2026 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 risk 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 2025 period.

With that, operator, our first question, please.

Operator

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

To withdraw your question, please press *11 again. Please stand by while we compile the Q&A roster.

Our first question comes from the line of Brent Navon with Bank of America. Your line is open.

Brent Navon

Good afternoon. Thank you.

Maybe just to start, can you explain some of the drivers for the strong 1Q results and maybe help us bridge that to your second quarter and full year guidance, especially given all the momentum you have and political in the second half. Then just as a follow-up question, maybe can you also discuss the impact of memory device prices are having on the devices segment and maybe how you're thinking about total device segment.

Thank you so much.

Anthony Wood

Hey Brent, this is Anthony. Thanks for your question.

I'll turn it over to Dan in a second to answer your actual question, but let me just say a few things. First, I just want to say that I'm very happy, super happy with the trajectory of our business.

We're on a great path, and I'm really excited with how things are going. We delivered an outstanding quarter, and are executing against our monetization initiatives.

For example, advertising revenue grew 27%, and our third-party partnership strategy is working. Adoption of Ads Manager is growing, and overall we're building a highly performant connected TV ad platform.

Then subscription revenue grew 30%, driven by premium subscription sign-ups. Obviously we're expanding our tier one partners in premium subscriptions.

We recently added Apple TV in March, and this week we announced Peacock. Of course, we just recently passed 100 million streaming households, which I'm very excited about.

It's a huge milestone for us. We're focused on execution, and we're super well positioned.

I'll let Dan take your exact question.

Dan Jedda

Thanks Anthony, and thanks for the question, Brent. Let me let me actually just add on to what Anthony said, then I'll ask answer your question, then I'll turn it back to Anthony on the second part of your question.

Just quickly, as as Anthony mentioned, Q1 was an outstanding quarter for us. Platform revenue grew 28%, coming in ahead of our outlook, benefiting from the Olympics and Super Bowl, which contributed to an increase in subscriptions and M&E spend.

EBITDA margins more than doubled year-on-year to nearly 12%, and our $148 million of free cash flow for the quarter was our second-highest free cash flow quarter on record, and near margins of free cash flow margins of nearly 16%. Very, very strong quarter for us.

We're very excited about it. To your specific question regarding the bridge from Q1 to Q2 and to full year, l- let me just say a few things.

Please keep in mind that regarding our Q1 versus our Q2 guide, first, we started to lap Frndly, the Frndly acquisition, in Q2, excluding Frndly in Q1, subscription revenue growth was 23%. Second, Q1 had the easiest comp with advertising, growing 12% year-over-year in Q1 of last year.

That growth stepped up to 19% in Q2 of last year, and we're comping this higher growth rate for the rest of this year of for the rest of the year in advertising once you back out political in in 2025. Third, as I just mentioned, Q1 benefited from the Olympics and the Super Bowl.

All that said, we expect Q2 platform to grow at a strong growth rate of 20% year-over-year, and I expect subscriptions and advertising both to be around this level of growth rate. For the full year, we increased our platform revenue guidance by over $100 million, or approximately three points of growth to nearly 21%, and we're increasing our EBITDA and EBITDA margins, and I fully expect free cash flow to again be above adjusted EBITDA for the full year.

All that said, we have we have much stronger visibility into Q2, I said this last quarter into Q1, we just have much stronger visibility into Q2 versus H2, just given the macro environment. As we gain better visibility into political and into other initiatives, we'll provide updated guidance for H2.

We're just being a little conservative on our H2 outlook. Anthony, do you want to start for the second question?

Anthony Wood

Yeah. Your second question was about memory prices in our device segment.

I guess first, I just want to highlight that the Roku TV operating system requires significantly less memory and storage than all our competing platforms. We spent a lot of effort building a highly customized OS designed specifically for television.

One of the main things we focused on was bill of materials cost. One of the ways we achieve lower bill of materials cost is just using less memory and also being more versatile in the types of memory we can use, because in the TV business, every dollar matters.

It's a hugely price-competitive market. Although memory prices are going up, actually, and obviously that's something in our first-party business, we need to manage, and I'll ask Dan to talk about that in a second.

Most of our business is actually third-party products. Third-party products, as memory prices go up, the bill of materials advantage that we have versus our competitors gets bigger.

The price difference expands. That attracts TV OEMs and retail partners, and that's good for our business.

It helps us win more accounts and win more retail placement. Although there is issues around memory that we have to manage, it's generally great for our business because of our bill of materials cost advantage, which allows us to just have a lower cost than all the competing products, and that gap is just widening right now by a pretty wide margin.

Dan, do you want to talk more about the specifics?

Dan Jedda

I'll just like Let me just start on this question by saying what's most important to know is that we remain confident in our ability to keep expanding EBITDA margins in 2026 and beyond. That's because we have confidence in growing our platform revenue double digits while also managing our device investment across both gross profit and operating expenses.

I I think it's You asked about device investment and the device segment. Let me just step back for a minute.

First, and I I just want you to remember that device revenue is generated from the sale of our players and 1P TV. It does not include revenue from the sale of our third-party Roku TV TVs by our OEM partners, and that is the largest portion of our overall device unit volume.

Second, we look at total device investment across both device gross profit and distribution costs, which sit in sales and marketing. Despite our expectations for elevated memory costs in the second half of this year, the amount of our overall device investment and unit sales factored into our full-year outlook hasn't changed for the year.

It hasn't changed from our our last quarter. Our prior outlook already accounted for the increasing memory prices, and we maintain the strategic flexibility to optimize the mix of units across players, first-party TVs, and third-party TVs.

Just overall, like no one knows what's what will happen to memory prices beyond this year, and and we really don't know how the market will react, the CTV market will react to higher memory prices. Even if memory prices remain elevated beyond this year, we're confident that our strong platform revenue growth and our device and operational flexibility provide us to provide put us in the position to continue to expand our EBITDA margins.

Brent Navon

Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Sean Diffley with Morgan Stanley.

Your line is open.

Sean Diffley

Great. Thanks very much, team.

I was hoping you could talk about what you're seeing with your third-party DSP strategy and Amazon in particular. I think you extended the partnership with them earlier this year, I was hoping you could elaborate on what you're seeing there.

Anthony Wood

Hey Sean, Charlie will take your question.

Charlie Collier

Thanks, Anthony. Hey Sean, appreciate the question.

I'll talk a little bit about Amazon, but just sort of stepping back, all of our DSP partnerships are important to us, and they all serve different customers and customer segments. Really the most important thing to know, as you ask this about our DSP, is that our strategy is to be open and interoperable and deeply integrated with every major DSP so that when clients want to transact, we meet them wherever they choose to transact.

That's whether it's on the Amazon DSP, or we just announced an extension of our DV360 deal with Google. We are going to be everywhere they wish to transact.

Then on top of that, strategically, medium term, our goal is to be the most performant CTV ad platform in the industry. Specifically today, how we're doing, I won't break out Amazon, but first quarter was evidence that our third-party DSP strategies are working.

The majority of our video delivery is now through third-party programmatic partners, Sean, and we are growing quickly. These take time to ramp.

We feel very good about how Amazon is doing and how our other partnerships are going. I think you're seeing the results in first quarter and certainly in our compounded share of programmatic revenue.

Combined, Amazon DSP, Trade Desk, Yahoo, FreeWheel, all of them, Advertisers can now access our premium inventory through virtually every major buying platform. Again, our job is to drive outcomes and performance for marketing partners, and we're really bullish as our position in the market as the open and interoperable partner, specifically in a marketplace with so many walled gardens.

Sean Diffley

Thanks very much.

Operator

Thank you. Thank you.

Our next question comes from the line of Justin Patterson with KeyBanc. Your line is open.

Justin Patterson

Great. Thank you very much, and congratulations on the 100 million household milestone and the Laguna Beach Special.

Conrad looked pretty excited wrapping that hat at the Nasdaq. Two quick ones if I can.

First, I was hoping to hear about how you're thinking about the role of Roku Originals today. Then second, there's been a lot of companies seeing meaningful productivity improvements from GenAI tools.

I'm curious how you're thinking about the pace of product innovation and what that might mean for improvements to discovery features or recommendations and what guardrails you have against rising token costs. Thanks so much.

Anthony Wood

Thanks, Justin. Let's see.

Charlie will take your question on originals, and then maybe I can take your second question on AI. All right.

Charlie Collier

Great. Thanks, Anthony.

Justin, first of all, I want to talk more about Conrad's hat. That was a great hat, and we're really happy with Laguna Beach.

He looked great. Let me talk a little bit about content, and I'll dive into originals like Laguna.

Our overall strategy in the content ecosystem is really differentiated, and it's been honed over the years. Our original programming strategy actually hasn't changed.

It's a targeted and powerful part of our offering, but even still, it remains a relatively small part of the overall content budget. Sort of stepping back, the strategy we've been saying in the upfront to our advertisers is that Roku has the hits and the habits, and the hits are ours, like thank you for mentioning it, Laguna Beach, which became our largest unscripted series ever, that's the 20th reunion Laguna Beach Special.

We have our hits and everyone else's on the platform, and then there are the habits, which are really important because that's comprised of the massive daily viewing that makes up so much of US TV viewing. With the 100 million households, which is why we were ringing the bell, and nearly half of streaming happening on our platform, our scale as a programmer is meaningful to every type of partner.

Specifically to your originals question, we do originals in four pillars: we complement everyone's hits and we build the lead-in to their hits; we also program against sports because it's such an important vertical and, of course, we serve as the lead-in to everyone's major sporting events; we then program seasonal, you'll see us do custom holiday movies with sponsors and holiday movies and World Cup specials around World Cup, as you might imagine, around seasonal events; and then you'll also see us do UI programming, from the Wicked launch, when that movie was released on demand, we had original programming in our UI and we brought Demi Lovato to do a concert on a Roku City rooftop, and just recently, we launched a UI original, which is Roku City Dash, an interactive game. We have originals that complement what we do very well, and again, the majority of our spending is actually against building the habits, which is our daily reach, cuz we see our viewer 25 days a month.

I'll turn it over to Anthony for the back part of your question, but just sort of end on saying, more people are going to watch the biggest TV events, and I'm talking the Olympics and the Super Bowl, right down to their biggest entertainment hits, they'll watch those on Roku more here than any other platform. We love helping our partners succeed, and then we love it when we build original programming as well that takes advantage of that.

Anthony. Then

Anthony Wood

your question about AI, I'll answer your specific question, but just talk generally about how we think about AI. At the highest level, AI is a very big opportunity for Roku.

It's a powerful tailwind for our business. We're integrating across our entire technology stack.

In our platform, we use AI across the platform to improve discovery and increase engagement, improve advertising performance, unlocking monetization opportunities. We've used AI in the platform since the beginning, but what's been happening over the last year or two has been moving our algorithms to modern generative AI algorithms, which just improves the performance.

The more we can personalize the experience, the more engagement we get, the more ads viewing we can drive, the more subscription sign-ups we can drive. We're using it on the platform, which is really helping the platform just be more effective for the viewer and monetization.

On engineering, we're rapidly adopting AI. It's definitely accelerating feature development and the speed at which we can develop new features.

It's definitely enhancing the productivity of each of the engineers. Then, of course, content, AI I believe, it's already happening, is going to lower the cost of content creation both for entertainment content and for ads, and that'll result in lower-cost content, which will drive engagement on our platform.

On the advertising side, using generative AI in our platform is helping us build the most performant connected TV ad platform, which is a big goal for us to be the most performant connected TV ad platform, and making great progress on that. We're really leaning into performance across a bunch of different aspects, everything from integrating AI, but also the team, the kinds of people we hire.

Then also, Ads Manager is only possible because of generative AI, which is opening up an entirely new market, a big market of performance advertisers and small and medium-sized businesses. That product is built entirely on generative AI, including the creation of the videos.

Then, of course, I guess finally, we're using AI across the entire company in terms for operations to drive operational efficiency and productivity. It's a big opportunity.

We're really leaning into it, and AI is strengthening our platform, it's improving monetization, and it's enhancing the performance of our business. In terms of controlling costs, we're still watching it carefully.

It's just something we'll balance. AI on the efficiency side will improve productivity, and that'll show up in other ways in OpEx.

I think there are definitely ways to manage the cost. At this point, it's very manageable, and we're just watching it carefully.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Vasily with Cannonball Research.

Your line is open.

Vasily Karasyov

Hi. Good afternoon.

Dan, I have a question for you, and the question is about the subscription revenue and how we should be thinking about forecasting it. You gave us five quarters now.

Are there any factors that we should keep in mind when we are looking at the growth, quarter-on-quarter growth throughout the year? Are there any seasonal factors?

Are there some bumps from adding tier one app into the Roku Channel? Anything that could help us frame that trajectory would be helpful.

Thank you.

Dan Jedda

Thanks for the question, Vasily. There is some seasonality to subscriptions.

For example, during sporting seasons, during NFL, there'll be a big jump up in subscriptions, number of subscriptions. There are, of course, things like price increases that are positive for our partners and therefore positive for us.

The reality is the most important factor is, first of all, we monetize tens of millions of subscriptions, the seasonality isn't going to move the needle from a quarter-to-quarter perspective. It exists, but we are so big in this area it doesn't move the needle.

What is impactful for us from a revenue side is the launch of not just tier one, but even our tier two and tier three premium subscription partners, which we're doing very well on because that brings incremental subscribers and therefore incremental subscription revenue as we continue to launch new partners. As Anthony said earlier on, we launched Apple, we recently launched Peacock, we'll have more launches in the future.

We also launched premium subscriptions in Mexico. We'll also launch more countries in the future.

We think that the growth rate that we're seeing in subscriptions, which is being driven mostly in part by adding more tier one, tier two, tier three premium subscription partners, we're also adding new features and new subscription products, and that will help over time. The growth rate that we see here is indicative of just the success that we're seeing in premium subscriptions and our direct-to-consumer subscriptions that we're having.

I think this growth rate is sustainable just given all we've got going, adding more tier ones, tier twos, and adding new features in our subscriptions segment.

Vasily Karasyov

Thank you. Can you give us an example maybe of tier one versus tier two app?

How do you classify that?

Dan Jedda

There's not a specific definition. As we've mentioned before, we view the larger content partners as these so-called tier ones.

We don't break it up, and we'll mention some of the larger launches. For example, Peacock, Apple, Paramount+ is a premium subscription partner.

We launched Apple in Mexico, again, think about the largest contents as tier ones. Again, there is also a relatively long torso and tail in this business, and again, we monetize tens of millions of subscriptions across our overall subscription business, and all of them are growing in a very good fashion for us.

Premium subscriptions is just growing faster.

Vasily Karasyov

Got it. Thank you.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Michael Nathanson with MoffettNathanson.

Your line is open.

Michael Nathanson

Great. Hey, can I just first say thanks for giving us the ad disclosure.

It's really helpful, and is well appreciated, thank you for that. On that line, if you look at gross margin on advertising, it's really picked up nicely.

This is probably an all-time high in gross margin, I have to assume. Can you talk a bit about what's driving that and sustainability to maybe even go higher from here?

Then for Anthony, I'd love to dig into the first-party versus third-party OEMs. Can you talk a bit about are there any differences to you on either monetization, performance, and why wouldn't you lean more to third-party if it's just more efficient to do it that way?

Thanks.

Anthony Wood

Thanks for your question. Let's start with Dan.

He can answer the question on gross margin, and then I'll talk about OEM.

Dan Jedda

Right. Advertising gross margin, to your point, at just over 60%, was very strong for us in Q1.

It was up over 400 basis points on a year-over-year basis from Q1 of last year. We feel very good about our advertising gross margins.

We're very focused on not just growing revenue, but improving our gross margins. We have a lot of, let's just say, tools at our disposal to help improve overall gross margins.

We have higher ad products coming to market. Think of the home screen monetization, like adding video in our home screen has been very positive for us.

We're also very efficient on how we deliver our campaigns from a gross margin standpoint. We have a lot of ways that we focus on overall gross margin and maximize the gross margin of the business in addition to maximizing the revenue.

To your question on sustainability, I do believe that this level is sustainable for the rest of this year and after. I think it could potentially even come up.

We'll see. We've got a lot of optimizations that we're always working on.

We've got a lot of new ad product that we're working on to help gross margins. We're focused on, again, driving both the overall advertising revenue as well as the GP of the business.

Again, 60% I believe it's going to sit at this level, maybe even come up for the rest of this year and thereafter as well. Then

Anthony Wood

to answer your question about first-party versus third-party, just to level-set on what those terms mean, when we say first-party products, we're talking about our streaming players, streaming sticks. These are products that we build and sell and distribute and market ourselves.

Then we also make first-party TVs, these are TVs. Again, we do everything: we build, sell, market, distribute.

These are sold under the Roku brand, as well as the Hero brand, which is one of our first-party brands that we use, as a known brand. Then third-party means working with other OEMs like TCL, Hisense, but there's many, many others.

In terms of monetization, they're pretty similar. I don't think there's any real difference by first-party versus third-party, but there's slight differences by channel, depending on the retail outlet.

You have different types of customers that shop there. That can result in slightly different monetization.

I don't think it's huge. Then also things like TV size affects monetization a little bit.

Bigger TVs have slightly higher monetization, but players and TVs might have slightly different monetization, but none of these things are particularly large, it's probably not worth focusing on it. Why wouldn't we lean into third-party more?

We lean into third-party a lot. It's, our partners are very important to us.

The majority of TVs sold are third-party TVs. The majority of Roku TVs sold are third-party TVs.

Why we have first-party and third-party TVs is because it's a very complicated distribution system when you sell the number of TVs it takes to be in over half of all broadband households. It means things like I don't know the exact number, but it's probably over 1,000 different models that we certify each year across first-party, third-party, different countries, different regions, different retailers.

The retail distribution channel for televisions is complicated, and different retailers want to differentiate by having different brands, different products, different models, and different price points, and different features. The ability to offer a variety of third-party products, as well as first-party products, just gives us maximum flexibility in how we go into the channel and maximize distribution, and it just gives us options.

That's why we do it. For example, Hero is currently, I think, exclusive to Target, which helps us get distribution in Target.

That's just a simple example, but there's lots of reasons we do it.

Michael Nathanson

Thanks, Anthony.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Rich Greenfield with Lightshed Partners.

Your line is open.

Rich Greenfield

Hi. Thanks for taking the question.

I've got a couple. One, you guys have been definitely expanding your tests and trials of a new home screen.

It looks like you're basically putting half the screen is now content boxes and you're pushing apps down to sort of the lower half of the screen and really bringing content forward and making it a persistent video box on the right side. I'm curious, how soon do you think this rolls out more broadly?

Two, related to that, what are you seeing early in terms of its impact on subscription uptake or advertising, any types of impact on sort of the business side would be great to understand. Then two, just because there's talk out of Antenna that Howdy hit a million subscribers, and whether or not that's true, it's very clear that Howdy has been far bigger than I think anyone listening to this call probably expected, and I'm curious, Anthony, how big can Howdy be?

Do you need to have original programming? Just sort of the future of Howdy would be great to hear your perspective on.

Anthony Wood

Thanks, Rich. Thanks for the questions.

It's great to hear from you. Let's see.

On the home screen, yeah, we've been testing the new home screen for a while. It's a big change.

Every Roku customer in the world will get the new home screen. It's not particularly optional.

When it rolls out. You want to make sure that customers are happy, that there's not going to be any complaints, that in fact, they're going to like it more than the old home screen, and it's easy to get most of the customers to like it more, but it's a little bit harder to get almost all the customers to like it more.

That's one of the things we've been focused on. We've been focusing on making sure it improves monetization, subscriptions and ads, that it helps us improve those businesses, improves engagement.

Those are the things we've been focusing on. The home screen's a super important asset to us.

It's in households that have over 125 million people every day, it's in households with over 125 million people and they start their TV viewing experience with our home screen every day. It's very iconic.

The other thing we've been focused on is not losing our sort of iconic look. Most connected TV platforms all kind of look the same.

Our home screen looks unique, and it's more delightful, we don't want to lose that. It's been testing, but it's been in a fairly large number of homes and it's going to be rolling out to everyone soon and we'll be launching soon.

The results we're seeing in the testing are we're definitely seeing more engagement, we're definitely seeing good viewer satisfaction, we're seeing increased monetization. In your question you had some screenshots and you noted a few things, like one of the things, for example, about a new home screen is that the Marquee Ad is visible when you first launch the home screen, whereas with the current home screen you have to scroll to the right to see the Marquee Ad.

That change alone is driving more click-throughs, increased click-through rates, so that's making the ad unit more visible, more valuable. Then making content more prominent is something that consumers want and also drives engagement, allows us to promote subscriptions, allows us to promote ad content.

Also on the app tiles, we're making the app tiles be a little bit more viewer-friendly, a little bit more likely to see the app they want near the top. That's just a few of the changes.

There's lots and lots of detailed changes, all designed to improve viewer satisfaction and monetization. The testing was good.

It's going to be a good change for us. Let's see.

Then you asked about Howdy. I can't really confirm third-party numbers, but just to remind everyone that doesn't know, Howdy is an owned-and-operated streaming service.

Our main owned-and-operated streaming service is The Roku Channel, which is free ad-supported content. It's the number two app on our platform.

It's like over 6% of all streaming viewing in the US now. Then Howdy's not as big as The Roku Channel because it's a lot newer, but it is doing extremely well, and it's a subscription service and there's no ads, it's sort of the opposite of The Roku Channel, and it's a SVOD service, it's ad-free, and it's $3 a month, and so it's very affordable and, I guess I would say that its position in the market, it's going after a segment of the market that's not currently served except by Howdy, which is, streaming services have been raising their prices, they've been increasing their ad loads, and so a low-cost, affordable streaming service is something that didn't really exist in the market.

That's the segment of the market we're going after and that's the segment we intend to stay in, and I think it's a very large segment. The content will just keep getting better, we'll just keep improving the quality of the content.

As we keep getting more and more viewers, that'll allow us to invest more and more in content. Now that's a positive cycle that will just keep riding.

I think it can be very large. I think it can be a very large part of the market.

So

Rich Greenfield

Do you ever see original programming?

Anthony Wood

We don't have plans right now for original programming. Original programming is expensive, requires a more expensive service generally.

That doesn't mean that I don't think that as we continue to improve the quality of the content, as the number of viewers gets bigger, I think we'll likely have originals someday. I don't know when that day will be.

We do have originals today. We have Roku Originals, but they're not the blockbuster originals you're probably thinking of.

They tend to be things like Laguna Beach, which is doing really well, but it's unscripted. We don't have a lot of scripted content in our originals today.

When you said originals, I was attributing it to mean a blockbuster-type originals. Those are going to come, I think, but that's not happening right now.

Right now, we're just focused on improving the quality of the content, promoting it in our UI, promoting it off our platform. We just recently launched on Amazon Prime.

We just launched in Mexico. Those are all doing really well.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Peter Supino with Wolfe Research.

Your line is open.

Peter Supino

Hi. A question on your DSP relationships.

If you could discuss the growth contributions that you're seeing in context of this great acceleration of ad sales. I'm wondering if you could rank order the growth contributions from Trade Desk, Amazon, and others.

Then I believe it's true that your relationship with DV360 is somewhat different than your relationship with Amazon, and so as that becomes a contributor, should it have a different impact? Thank you.

Anthony Wood

Hey Peter, thanks for the question. Charlie will take the question.

Charlie Collier

Thank you. Hey Peter.

I answered this a little bit in an earlier question, and I started, I think, by saying that each of these relationships is different and important, and I always start with the customer. They want to transact in different ways and they have different goals, I think a lot about strategy first: how do we serve the customer, and we do so, as I said before, being open and interoperable, being deeply integrated with every major DSP, and then meeting the clients everywhere they want to transact.

We're doing that, and then on top of that, our goal is obviously to be the most performant CTV platform. To dive into your specific question about DV360's expansion, we did expand, and it is slightly different.

In fact, all of our DSP relationships are different. We signed up with Campaign Manager 360, which is important for three reasons.

First is, Roku is the first streamer to participate in this publisher match, and I love that Roku's an early mover, so that's new for us. Secondly, it enables holistic management of YouTube for the first time, which really means, Peter, that advertisers can activate Google's first-party data and their own first-party data, meaning the advertiser's first-party data on Roku Media inside DV360.

These are audiences that previously only worked on YouTube in isolation, so that's a really big deal. Then the third part of why DV360 is important is because Campaign Manager 360 measures Roku Media regardless of where the advertisers buy lands, which means that it'll provide proof of Roku's outstanding performance up and down the marketing funnel.

That's great for us because as we seek to be known as the most performant CTV platform, this is just another spoke in the wheel that will prove how performant we are, not just in our own media, but as we travel across all sources of advertising platforms.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of John Hodulik with UBS.

Your line is open.

John Hodulik

Great, thanks. Maybe can we talk about the subscription revenue gross margin?

Looks like sort of different than what you're seeing in the advertising side. You've saw some pressure over the last few quarters on the gross margin side there.

What's driving that? Is it mix shift, or just any help there or outlook on the margin there would be great.

Then I see that non-M&E ad spend on the home screen has reached 30%. Can you talk about where you think that number can go and what are some of the categories where you have a success selling inventory on the home page?

Thanks.

Anthony Wood

Dan will take that.

Dan Jedda

Thanks for the question, John. On subscriptions, yes, subscriptions were just north of 40% our subscriptions gross margin.

That is down. It is mix that's driving that.

We have different subscription activities within there that mix out to higher revenue growth, but slightly lower gross margins. We are seeing that in Q1.

I do expect it to stay at this 41 to 42% level for the rest of this year. We also have some other higher-margin activities that we think will grow in Q2 and for the rest of the year.

Premium subscriptions is driving that down a little bit, but I expect it to level off here at this level. Again, we have a lot of activities going on in subscriptions that will actually help a gross margin, but all in all, I think we're at that level where we're going to sustain it for the rest of this year in this 41 to 42%.

That will along with the advertising margin I talked about it being at just north of 60%, I think will take platform revenue out to be closer to the high end of the 51 to 52% range that we have in overall platform. I don't expect this to go down from there, I expect this to maintain this level, if not come up a little bit.

To your question on non-M&E, and I'll let Charlie jump in if he wants, but on the home screen ads growing significantly on non-M&E, that is a tailwind for us. Adding video to the home screen has been very impactful and very important for us.

We are seeing more diversification on the home screen for our video ad unit. I think Anthony mentioned earlier that the new home screen, which collapses the left nav, has that ad unit front and center right from the beginning, which will also be a positive in terms of more impressions to even sell on that ad unit.

This diversification matters a lot because we can expand the availability of that ad unit, which would be a positive for us in both revenue and gross margin. We're very happy with that specific area of the home screen.

There's also other areas of the home screen to monetize, but that one is particularly unique, and it has the ability to both help our advertising revenue and our advertising gross margin. I don't know, Charlie, if you have anything else.

Oh

Charlie Collier

well, John, non-M&E brands represented nearly 30% of the Roku experience advertising revenue in first quarter. That's a big deal.

That's an all-time high for us. As Dan said, it's deliberate.

We've been working for years on demand diversification, seeing that number was really meaningful. It also just is a great balance to our M&E strategy overall because now we're not reliant on any one category to fill these outstanding units.

As I look at M&E now, when the M&E market is healthy, as Dan said, there's a tailwind for Roku, and when it's soft, the rest of Roku's book now carries us. That's a major difference between this year and years prior.

John Hodulik

Great. Thanks, guys.

Operator

Thank you. Our next question comes from the line of Laura Martin with Needham.

Your line is open.

Laura Martin

Hi. I have two.

The first, Anthony, you're aggregating the most expensive types of content, film and TV, and we're hearing from Netflix that they're going to add some lower-cost content, maybe highest-quality YouTube influencers. Can you talk about your vision for how you see aggregation here and how you expect to drive engagement long-term, which may take different kinds of lower-cost content?

That's my first. Then, my second is on devices.

We have device revenue down 16% with a negative 14% margin, and it seems to me that that matters whether that is the actual sticks that we're seeing a negative comp in, or whether it's just your physical Roku-branded televisions aren't getting as much adoption, or if you just got kicked out of Walmart because they bought VIZIO and now they're taking away your shelf space, which doesn't feel recurring to me. Could you maybe go granularly into what is driving the downgrade on the unit side on the device line?

That would help me. Thank you.

Anthony Wood

Hey Laura, thanks. Let's see.

On content, I think you're we talked about the Netflix announcement, they just announced they're going to do clips. The we do have so we do have that kind of content on Roku in a lot of different places.

We're a distribution platform. We obviously have our own and operated services, but we're also a distribution platform primarily for third-party services.

We carry YouTube, it's very popular. It's, has all the low-cost content.

Then in our own in our own services, we distri- we distribute clips from things like Saturday Night Live to movie trailers to sports highlights from multiple leagues. We do have we do have sort of a best of the clips strategy, in in our owned-and-operated services.

We aren't currently trying to compete with YouTube. We carry YouTube, and it's a great product, so that's kind of how we view our that's how we view clips.

I do think content costs, with Howdy, we are we are focused on offering a low-cost service. That means we are on the lookout for both high-quality, more expensive content, as well as high-quality, less expensive content.

Things like content that's lower cost because it incorporates II AI production, those sort of things, we are, or where there's unscripted. We are we are definitely focused on a broader array of content, including lower-cost content.

That's I think that's the that's your question on content. Then on devices, I'll let I'll let Dan take that question.

Dan Jedda

I think your question is what's driving revenue down and margins on devices. I just want to say, first of all, a couple things going on.

The ASPs in streaming players continue to come down, that also has higher memory costs associated to it. That does impact overall margins.

I think it's important to note that from an overall unit perspective, we are on track to where we expected to be for total units across all of our devices. I just want to be clear, we're not kicked out of Walmart.

We still sell a lot of units at Walmart. We sell a lot of third-party units at Walmart.

We sell a lot of first-party TVs. Matter of fact, first-party TVs are growing quite well on a year-over-year basis.

To be clear, it's not a volume issue per se, it's simply from an ASP perspective and the higher memory pricing that we're seeing specifically in the back half of the year that we talked about in our guidance.

Anthony Wood

Then I think, Laura, you asked about Walmart, or in our device distribution generally, let me just ask Mustafa to talk for a little bit about that.

Mustafa Ozgen

This is Mustafa speaking. We feel good about our progress in terms of diversifying our distribution, and we are also on track with our overall device unit sales target for the year.

As Anthony mentioned earlier, we recently surpassed 100 million streaming households worldwide, it's a major milestone for us, but it also highlights our scale and momentum that we have. In the US, we are, again, in more than half of the broadband households, customers love our products.

We build really great products. We offer a delightful experience.

Retailers want to sell this type of good product, and they carry our products across their shelves. Again, as Dan mentioned, we continue to have a great relation with Walmart.

Again, our products really fit well for Walmart customer base, the shoppers love our products. At the same time, we are successfully broadening and diversifying our retail distribution.

We grew our presence at Target. Anthony mentioned earlier, the Hero brand TVs, it's really helping with our partnership at Target.

Best Buy, we're growing; Amazon, we're growing; regional retailers, we're growing; and we expect to add more retailers in the second half of the year as well. At the same time, we're actively expanding and diversifying our TV OEM licensing agreements, including with our long-term partners, TCL and Hisense.

Again, Anthony mentioned, the increasing memory costs across the industry is helping us quite a bit. We're becoming more attractive to OEMs and retailers.

We're going to see the impact of these updated partnerships in the second half of the year's sales of our products. Overall, really, we're well positioned.

We build streaming sticks, first-party TVs, third-party TVs. This portfolio gives us flexibility depending on the market conditions.

Cost conditions, we can lean into one product over the other one. Overall, we feel really comfortable with our distribution strategy.

The number of Roku TVs units sold may go up or down from quarter to quarter, but overall, we expect to continue to grow our scale.

Laura Martin

Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Please stand by for our next question.

Ladies and gentlemen, due to the interest of time, our final question will come from the line of David Joyce with Seaport Research Partners. Your line is open.

David Joyce

Thank you. As you continue to deepen your integrations with DSPs and maybe add a few more, what could that do to the cadence of the advertising gross margin?

I know you did talk about overall where you think it could be at the end of it, but was just wondering what those impacts might be over the next few quarters. Thanks.

Anthony Wood

Thanks, David. Dan will take your question.

Dan Jedda

The way we integrate with the demand-side platforms, they're an impact to the volume of impressions that we get depending on where the advertiser wishes to transact. Charlie talked in detail about how we integrate with the DSPs.

There's not a margin impact. How we integrate across the different DSPs really don't have a margin impact with the one caveat being Amazon where it's at the platform level, which will be positive.

The remaining DSPs where we integrate and adopt their identifier, like a hashed email, etc., it's not going to impact our margins either way. What will impact margins are how we fulfill, which we're very good at, the ad units that we have on the home screen, etc., and how we just complete the campaigns internally, which again, we're very good at optimizing for that.

That's not a function of how the demand comes in, it's a function of how we fill the demand on our side with our platform, which again, we're just getting better and better at.

David Joyce

Understood. Thank you very much.

Operator

Thank you. Ladies and gentlemen, at this time, I would like to turn the call back over to Anthony for closing remarks.

Anthony Wood

Thanks. It was an outstanding quarter, and I'd just like to thank our employees, customers, advertisers, and content partners, and thanks to all the listeners for listening.

Operator

That concludes today's conference call. Thank you for your participation.

You may now disconnect.