Roku Taking Flight

If you’ve turned on the TV, tuned into the radio or surfed the web this holiday season it would be almost impossible to miss the massive marketing campaign that Roku has launched to drive sales of it’s new $49.99 Roku Purple Box.  It sounds super cool and caught my attention (even though we have an Apple TV.)  I wanted to see if I was the only one taken-in by this campaign. So I dug into the social stream using the Attensity firehose (a multi-channel real-time ingestion and analytics engine that processes millions of conversations a day) and checked out how the market is reacting to their messaging.

First conclusion, people are excited! Top consumer electronics influencers and shopping influencers are talking about this product, both reporting on it, so a lot of neutral content about the features and at the end of their assessment, showing positive sentiment about it.  Below is a snippet of some of the top social mentions on the Roku with influencers with high Klout scores and high impact and reach scores (Attensity influencer metrics.)

There is lots of buzz about the 350+ premium channels, streaming content from Netflix, Hulu Plus, HBO, wireless, game connectors (I am kind of excited and maybe even a bit scared about the Angry Birds on the big screen opportunity), access to flickr, etc.  Here’s the buzz chart – which is reflective of the many reviews, plus the positive sentiment as well.

So far, it seems like the social customer is convinced and the advertising blitz is taking hold. And at that price, it would make a great gift, even for people who don’t have subscriptions to Netflix or Hulu Plus, because there are several free channels through Roku, including free movie channels and access to Pandora.  You can find a list of what you have to choose from here.   It will be interesting to see if the buzz translates to business.