• by Wayne Friedman , February 15, 2023

Defying many industry expectations, set-top TV and streaming distributor platform Roku grew active accounts in the fourth quarter by 16% (10 million) to 70 million over the same period a year ago.

This drove Roku's stock price sharply up by 12% in after-market Wednesday trading.

In its shareholder letter, the company says: “Full year net adds were above both 2019 and 2021 levels and driven primarily by the Roku TV program in the U.S. and international markets. In the U.S., our active accounts are approaching half of broadband households -- and we believe this share will continue to grow.”

Active accounts were also up 4.6 million from the third quarter of 2022.

Roku's key “platform” revenue -- which includes advertising revenues -- was up 5% year-over-year to $731.3 million.

It achieved these results “despite a difficult macro environment in 2022,” and as many legacy TV media companies have seen declining fourth-quarter advertising revenues and projections of further declines in the early part of this year.

Overall quarterly revenue was essentially flat at $867.1 million from the fourth quarter of 2021. Device revenue for Roku -- its set-top-box and TV sets -- was down 18% to $135.8 million in the period.

In more positive news for Roku, average monthly revenue per user grew 2% to $41.68. In addition, streaming hours on the Roku platform were up 23% year-over-year to 23.9 billion hours.

At the same time, Roku posted a big net loss from operations of $249.9 million, versus a $21.4 million net profit for the same period a year ago. Gross profit sank 4% to $364.4 million.