Roku just delivered a quarter Wall Street had a hard time arguing with: revenue climbed 22%, profit flipped from a loss to a gain, and management raised full-year guidance while opening up new detail on the money-making parts of its platform. The bigger story is that Roku is no longer just a box-and-app-company hybrid; Roku ad and subscription revenue are doing more of the heavy lifting, which is exactly where the streaming-TV money has been migrating for years.
The San Jose company reported first-quarter revenue of $1.248 billion, net income of $85.7 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $148.4 million, up 165% year over year. Shares jumped more than 11% in after-hours trading, a reminder that investors still reward streaming businesses when they can show actual operating leverage instead of just audience size. Roku also said this was its best quarter yet for premium subscription sign-ups.
Roku ad and subscription revenue drives platform growth
Roku’s Platform segment brought in $1.13 billion, up 28%, with gross margin of 51.6%. That bucket includes advertising and subscription video revenue, and the company is now giving investors a clearer look inside it – a sensible move, since platform monetization is what separates the winners from the also-rans in connected TV. Amazon, Google, Apple, and Samsung all want a piece of the living room; Roku’s edge is that it can sell reach, data, and ad tech without owning a hardware empire.
- Advertising revenue: $613 million, up 27%
- Advertising gross margin: 60.5%
- Subscriptions revenue: $519 million, up 30%
Roku said video advertising growth on its platform outpaced both the U.S. over-the-top streaming market and the digital ad market. That’s a useful boast, but it also fits the broader trend: advertisers are shifting money toward connected TV because it offers a cleaner path to measurable results than old-school TV ever did.
Devices still play the support role
The Devices business remains the less glamorous side of the operation. Revenue fell 16% to $118 million, dragged down by lower player unit sales and promotional pricing, and gross margin came in at -16.3%. Roku continues to treat hardware as a means to feed the platform, not the main event, which is why the company seems far more interested in margin expansion than in flooding store shelves with cheap sticks.
Streaming hours also kept rising, reaching 38.7 billion in the quarter, up 8%. Earlier this month Roku said it had surpassed 100 million streaming households worldwide, though it no longer reports that figure every quarter. Scale matters here because it feeds the ad machine, and ad machines are what investors are paying for.
Guidance points to more growth in Q2
For the full year, Roku raised adjusted EBITDA guidance to $675 million from $635 million and kept nudging expectations higher across the business. It now expects Platform revenue to grow nearly 21% to $5.0 billion, Devices revenue to reach $535 million, and total net revenue to come in around $5.5 billion, up 16% versus 2025.
For Q2, the company expects Platform revenue growth of 20%, Devices revenue to fall in the ”high-single digits,” total net revenue of $1.3 billion, gross profit of $580 million, and adjusted EBITDA of $170 million. That is a healthy run rate, but the real question is whether Roku can keep translating audience scale into pricing power fast enough to hold off the giants circling the same ad dollars.
On Wednesday, Roku also announced a deal with the CW Network that will bring next-day programming to the Roku Channel starting in the fall of 2026, including ”Private Eyes West Coast,” ”Police 24/7,” ”Scrabble,” ”Trivial Pursuit,” and weekly ”WWE NXT” episodes after their live Tuesday night broadcast. It’s another small but telling signal: Roku wants to be more than a device gateway, and the easiest way to do that is to keep stuffing the channel with stuff people will actually watch.