... Bank of America. Really delighted to have Dan Jedda, newly appointed Chief Operating Officer and CFO of Roku. Thanks so much for being here. So maybe to just kick it off, high-level overview, your business appears to be doing really well, with your platform revenue guidance, implying high teens organic growth in 3Q, mid to high teens in 4Q. Maybe we can just start, level set. Big focus of you guys is, you know, past few years' monetization. High-level update on some of the monetization initiatives that you have going on at the company right now.
Sure. And thanks for having us. We're always happy to join Bank of America, great partner with Roku overall, so thanks for having us. So, yeah, our strategy really since the end of 2023, when we exited 2023, after we right-sized our cost initiative, our cost structure, which was a big focus on my first six months at the company. We talked a lot about a real pivot to the execution of the monetization initiative, which is the third part of our three-part strategy. We focus on building scale first in a market, and then as we build scale, we focus on engagement, and then once you have scale and engagement, we focus on monetization of that scale and engagement. And in the U.S., we've built a tremendous amount of scale.
We're at over half of broadband households in the U.S. We just put out a press release, I think it was yesterday, that talked about how now there's more streamed on the Roku platform than there is on all linear combined in terms of viewership and hours. It also says that... This is Nielsen data. It also says that now over a fifth of all TV viewing, combined linear plus digital, happens on the Roku platform. So it's enormous reach that we have across the U.S. The engagement is exceptional. We stream hundreds of billions of hours a year, and the Roku Channel has incredible reach, has incredible engagement in terms of hours streamed. It's our last... During our last report, we said it was over 80%. It's gonna continue to grow in significant double digits.
So now that we've got that scale and engagement, we've really pivoted towards the monetization initiatives of all that scale and that engagement, and that's been something we've done over the last 18 months. You're starting to see a lot of that focus come in with our platform revenue growth. As you mentioned, it's in the high teens. We're very happy with that, very proud of that. And how we're doing that is we have a lot of supply of ad inventory. We have a lot of engagement that we can monetize. We have a lot of reach that we can monetize, and we've done some...
We've built a process to where we've opened up all of Roku to a lot of more demand than we had, say, call it two years ago, by integrating with all the demand-side platforms, and when I say all, we're integrated with all of them. We're gonna continue to integrate and go deeper with all of them. We're integrated with many of the supply-side platforms as well. We've built new and innovative ad products. We're very focused on the performance measurement markets. We also have higher ultra-premium inventory, so we run the gamut of the CPM demand curve, now, which is very different than where we were, call it two and a half years ago, so we feel really good about the position that we've put ourselves in to continue to monetize this incredible reach that we've built with broadband penetration.
That's a great overview and a lot of topics that we will dive into a little bit deeper. So I guess on your platform segment, now makes up 90% of your revenues, and it really sits at the core of this, you know, the Roku story. You're approaching a hundred million households. You're rapidly growing engagement, especially at Roku Channel. You know, what do you view as Roku's greatest asset, and, you know, what do you think investors most underappreciate about the Roku platform?
Yeah, that is a great question, and actually, thanks for asking, 'cause now I can really talk about, and maybe even brag a little bit about what I believe our greatest asset is. Because it's really something that is. I would say it's not as well known as other assets. So when you think about the CTV world, there's a lot that's talked about in terms of, like, the critical assets of, like, live sports or big content budgets or specific IP, like, Marvel or Lucas or, you know, a certain IP that's out there. And we can monetize all that in different ways. We monetize live sports through subscriptions. We monetize a lot of our streaming hours that are outside the Roku Channel, but our biggest asset is our platform.
Our biggest asset is the fact that we control the UI when 150+ million people a day start their TV experience by turning on a Roku TV. So when you think about that, you have 150 million people plus starting their journey with the UI that we control, and it allows us to nudge people into certain areas, subscriptions that we monetize, impressions, ad AVOD, the advertising video on demand that we monetize, the overall streamer experience that we have. We have the left nav of our home screen has sport zones, like the NFL Zone. When the Olympics are on, we have an Olympic Zone. We have a Home & Garden Zone.
You think about the content row at the top of the home screen, which is an ML-based content row that's highly personalized to whoever's viewing, where we can show subscriptions that we think they will like or shows that we think that we'll like, and they also happen to be the subscriptions and the shows that we monetize. So when you think about controlling the UI and controlling the viewer's experience and journey throughout the platform, that is our biggest asset. Now, I would just say that what you're seeing now is, in the last eighteen months, you're seeing how we've taken that asset, and we've really focused on monetizing that asset through all the different ad products, the demand-side platforms that we've integrated, the supply that we've created in the Roku Channel of impressions to sell. So-...
We've really pivoted to focusing on monetizing that home screen, monetizing the asset that we have, monetizing the left nav, monetizing the new ad products like video in the Marquee, and monetizing the incredible reach that we've built over, you know, the last, you know, 15+ years. That's been a pivot for us. Call it, you know, at the end of 2023 , and so now you're just seeing the execution of that. We have a lot of other initiatives that we're still working on, but, the growth that we've seen, the profitability that we've generated, the free cash flow that we have is a function of the execution of those monetization initiatives.
And again, you know, just sticking with the power of the platform, I mean, that's a great segue to The Roku Channel, right? And how the platform can really drive that. And, you know, so here you have The Roku Channel. You're growing engagement over 80%. You're delivering great, you know, great revenue growth, but not, you know, not quite keeping up. So I guess two parts here is: so how sustainable is that pace of engagement growth going forward, and what levers do you have to pull to sort of drive convergence there?
Yeah. Great, great question. So yes, you're right. TRC, the Roku Channel, the last numbers we gave, I think, were, it's growing greater than 80%. We're now comping some big improvements we made to the home screen, like that content row on the top. So I suspect that that growth rate will drop, but it will still be significant double digits. You know, well, well in excess of 20%, 25%, 30%. I'm talking 50%, 55%, 60% growth. We'll still see that in the Roku Channel because of this, like, amazing asset of controlling the UI that I just talked about.
So the supply of inventory to sell is going to be there for us, not just in the Roku Channel, but in the rest of the platform, the rest of the media network, what we call the run of the media network. That also is growing. So we have a tremendous amount of sellable inventory for advertising. I'm sure we'll talk about subscriptions later, but let's just stick with TRC. That we'll continue to have. And so one of our big focuses, now that we have this inventory, is: how do we bring more demand to fill this inventory? And by the way, when I say we're growing this inventory, we're growing it in a relatively inexpensive way. We don't need to scale content linearly with growth of TRC hours.
And we don't have to go out and spend hundreds and hundreds of millions of dollars to get more ad inventory. We can do it because we control the UI, and we have very good content already in the Roku Channel. Supply, not a problem, gonna continue to grow, gonna be significant. The demand side is what, again, what I talk about when I talk about the execution of the monetization initiatives, because supply is it doesn't of itself lead to revenue. The demand coming in is what ultimately leads to advertising revenue, content distribution revenue, et cetera.
So what we're doing there is, in addition to having very innovative and unique ad products, like video on the home screen now, which we call the Marquee ad unit on the right-hand side of our home screen. We've added video. It used to be a static display, now we've added video, and we've done that to diversify for that ad unit, which was primarily M&E, to be much broader than that. So now you'll see a lot of brand advertisers come in and buy that 'cause they want video. Think autos, think companies who can show an automobile video, think a theatrical trailer, you know, anything from McDonald's to all the different big brands are buying that.
We've integrated with every, I believe it's every, if not nearly every demand side platform out there, and now our goal is to go deeper with each one, so we are higher up on the funnel of the demand that comes our way, so we can fill it. 'Cause like I said, we have plenty of supply. So, we're integrated with, you know, obviously, we're integrated with The Trade Desk. We're integrated with Amazon. I'll talk about that in a minute, but we're also integrated with DV360. We're integrated with AppLovin. We're integrated with Yahoo's DSP.
Like, we're integrated with all of them, and the next phase of this build-out of bringing demand onto the Roku platform so we can serve advertising is going deeper with all these integrations, so we are more top of the funnel in terms of the fill rate that we can generate. So with Trade Desk, we adopted UID, which is a hashed email, where we are now more deeply integrated with Trade Desk, so more demand comes our way. Amazon, different deal, 'cause Amazon has different goals as a DSP. We've integrated in a different way with Amazon that's across the platform, and it you know which goes beyond just us as a publisher with the Roku Channel and is across the platform. And we'll go deeper with all the DSPs. They all want. They all have different goals in the integrations.
We'll continue to go deeper with all of them, so we bring more demand to fill the supply that we've generated.
Yeah, so I guess on the demand side, right, like, you know, when you think about your integrations, right? So you first integrated with Trade Desk, then you did ACR data, then you did UID 2.0 . Now you are doing this, you know, platform-level data with Amazon. When you say deeper, like, you know, what could the next, what could deeper look like from here? Like, what more could there potentially be to go?
Yeah, it really depends on the goals of the demand-side platforms. All DSPs have different goals. Like Amazon is, of course, looking at purchase graphs, and so they want to be able to recognize the actual customer or streamer and show the right purchase graphs to improve the performance of any ad being shown. So we'll integrate in a way with Amazon that allows them to do that, where we will be a beneficiary across the platform. Amazon will also be a beneficiary. If a DSP wants more signals, we'll get, you know, we'll provide as many signals as we can with our first-party data.
If a DSP is maybe focused on app installs, I'm just saying that, like an AppLovin maybe focused on app installs, which is less signal-based, more lower-cost CPMs, more just a lot of impressions to get app installs, we can do that because we have the inventory. And there might be different signals involved in that DSP type of deal versus a DV360 on Google. So I can't answer your question specifically because it really does depend on the DSP, and we're talking to all of them. We want to go deeper with all of them, and deeper is a DSP-by-DSP basis.
... it's not as though it's like flipping a switch, right? Like, these are gradual builds, and so, you know, like, you think about Trade Desk, this has been an ongoing relationship for a while. Like, I mean, do you- you're still not fully ramped there, right? Like, there's still more runway there. I mean, as you think about Amazon, you've said that it'll ramp in 4Q, but, you know, these are gradual type of builds.
Correct.
If you-
You don't just plumb the pipes in, the data pipes and flip switches, and instantly you have got all this demand that you can fill. It's much more complicated than that. It's again, DSP -by- DSP dependent, but you ultimately want to plumb in, you want to start to trade the signals, and then you constantly iterate to improve the performance within the DSP to basically improve your chance at winning in the auction. And so that's again, where our first-party data can come in and help us. That's how the Amazon DSP works, that's how UID 2.0 works with the hashed emails. So, yes, you're absolutely right, and it's really important, and we've got teams focused on this, that you are constantly iterating to improve that overall performance.
'Cause remember, like, the goal of the programmatic pipes is primarily, yes, there's reach involved, but it is a performance-driven campaign goals that are doing this. So the impressions that perform the best are the ones that are ultimately gonna win in this game. And so how do you perform the best? The DSP by DSP dependent, but that's the ultimate goal when you, as a publisher, when you go to the market and take part in the auction.
I guess on that point on performance, I mean, historically, you know, Roku did about $1 billion in advertising sales at upfronts. And so, you know, I'd be curious, you know, there's a lot of debate about, you know, shift from brand to performance. You know, how has your direct brand advertising trended over the last few years? You know, where do you see it going from here, especially versus, you know, more programmatic or performance-based advertising?
Yeah. Another really good question because I think this market... I think the market's changing in this respect. So, you know, linear was all about brand. It's all about reach and brand. The more reach you get, you know, the more budgets you'll get from a brand perspective, and they have ways to measure it, but they're not great ways. They have MMM models, they have holdout models, they have, you know, market models, the et cetera. So you pivot to CTV, and I do believe CTV at first probably was more brand, and that shift has focused to be more based on performance because you can actually measure the performance of CTV advertising.
And so I believe this shift is gonna continue to happen, where you know, even the budgets that are focused on brand are gonna have a performance aspect to it. A lot of this will funnel through programmatic pipes. You see this now, it's well over half that we see through programmatic pipes. I think that number could hit 75% going through that. I do think you're always gonna have ultra-premium and premium CPMs that are sold in different ways. To answer your... But a lot of it will go through the programmatic way, and that's why we changed strategy to focus not on our own DSP, which is something which was based on an acquisition, and an ad product we called OneView.
We pivoted, call it two years ago, to open up to all the DSPs because we want to meet the advertiser wherever they wanna transact. If they want to do guaranteed ultra-premium, we have those products, with our home screen, with Roku City, with our video ad unit. If they wanna go at the higher price CPM curve with signals, we can, we can do that. If they wanna be on the ultra-low CPM with different signals, we can be there as well. And we wanna be plumbed into everyone, depending on whatever the campaign goal is of the advertiser and whatever way they wanna advertise, through programmatic pipes, through whatever DSP they choose, we wanna be there for them as the supply of inventory. So I do think this shift will continue. I think it's an important shift to note.
It's one where we feel very good about because of our overall supply and because of our first-party data, that we can not just be effective in, but even be a, you know, a big winner in this space and the shift to programmatic. To answer your question on the upfronts, we just completed ours. It went very well. There's still a lot going on with the so-called guaranteed, where you lock in rates, you lock in impressions. That's still a very important book of business for us. We're doing very well in that book as well. Our teams just came back from that with some, you know, with some very favorable discussions that they had across the agencies.
That's great. And I guess just that 75% programmatic target, I guess, just curious, like, where does that sit today in terms of, like, how big is programmatic as a percentage of your business today?
We don't disclose that. It's over 50%, and it's-
Okay
... on its way. Whether, what, when, and when it gets to 75%, more to come on that, but it is a significant amount-
Okay
... of how we do business.
Got it. Shifting gears a bit, you know, I think another interesting opportunity for you guys is, you know, self-serve, and it really has the potential to unlock this new class of advertiser that historically couldn't access TV. I think this has been the promise of media companies for a while, but, you know, it feels like maybe we might finally be at that point where it can happen, so you know, just kinda curious how material you view this can be over the next few years and, you know, what you guys, you know, what your plans are in that market?
Yeah. Yeah, what an exciting market. It's not that it could be, it's that we're there. This is happening. This is launched, real-world self-service CTV impressions served, you know, primarily for the SMB market. So let's just talk about it 'cause it's one of the areas I'm most excited about. Yes, we have a shift of linear into CTV. That shift's gonna continue, so there's this tailwind into CTV from the continued shift in linear. Matter of fact, I would argue that because now almost all sports are available in CTV, I think live sports was the one holdout for linear. That's changed. If you just use the NFL as an example, you know, several years ago, you had to have linear to watch many of the NFL games.
I think, I think, I could be wrong on this, but I think almost every, if not every game now, is available on CTV for the NFL, and I'll even go one further. I think a certain percent, double-digit percent, maybe it's 15%, maybe it's 20%, are only available on CTV. When you think about Thursday Night Football, when you think about the exclusive games on Christmas Day and some of the exclusive games on Peacock, Netflix, Peacock, Amazon, the only way to watch these games is on CTV. You can't watch many of the NFL games on linear. So what was true five years ago is no longer true, and I think that's gonna continue to shift. In addition, that CTV market's gonna continue to grow.
In addition and by the way, the hours have already shifted, so when you think of, like, 60% of the hours roughly have shifted from linear to digital, only 30-ish percent of the ad budgets had shifted. That's gonna catch up over time because you're gonna wanna advertise where the eyeballs are. This. To your point on the SMB market, you have another tailwind into the CTV market, which is this notion that a small or a medium-sized business which didn't have access to an agency because of their size and/or they did not want to go through a DSP because of the complicated nature of doing so, they were. They have been primarily shut out of the CTV market. They might have had a little bit in the linear with local advertising, but even that was complicated.
Now, that entire CTV ecosystem from, from an advertising standpoint has opened up to them. Why? Because now there's self-service products. We have one called Ads Manager. There's a self-service product where you can go into our Ads Manager product. You can click your campaign performance goals. You can click site visits, you can click conversion, you can click different campaign reach, installs, you know, click-through rates. Whatever, whatever your goal is, you can click through it like you do with performance, with their performance budgets. You can use Gen AI to create a very well-produced video commercial, and you can be up and running on CTV in, you know, a geo-targeted way within minutes, not days, within minutes.
So you now have a new vertical, a new budget, a new medium, if you will, to spend this performance budget that they have been spending on. Whether it's $5,000, $10,000, $100,000, $200,000, you can now do this in a self-service way, just like you can with the traditional performance-based budgets, like in, you know, keyword bidding or on your social. You can now do this on CTV. I think this is a very exciting time. Whatever you think the performance market is, 60%, $100+ billion, a chunk of that will likely move over, in my opinion, to CTV because it's a new way for them to advertise, and everybody wants video. Like, they would much rather have video than bidding on keywords, or at least they'd like the opportunity to showcase a video.
If you own a car dealership, five or four or three car dealerships in a regional location and you want site visits, you can be up and running on that. You can measure those site visits with your video that's running in a geo-targeted location for you, just like you can on any sort of performance market. I think this is very excited, exciting because it's an entirely new market on top of that CTV market, that $90 billion-ish CTV market that already exists. This is on top of that. This is incremental, and I think a lot of, a lot of these SMB businesses will take some share of wallet and convert that over as long as it works, and so it becomes about the measurement.
It becomes about the performance of it, the ease of self-service, very important, the ability to easily create a video, very important, and of course, the performance of it is very performant. And guess what? We are great at performance. So this is an area I think we can do very well, and I think we're gonna be a leader in this space.
Yeah, and so I guess just to follow up on that, right? Like, I guess customer awareness, you know, SMBs have to be made aware that this product... and obviously the simplicity of the product, you know, especially for an SMB that may not have, you know, the sophistication, right? So I guess, what's the plan to make the SMB market aware of this offering and kind- you know, what's... how does... what's your, what's your-
Yeah
... plan for that?
So there's gotta be marketing behind it. I mean, some of it will be word-of-mouth. There's got to be marketing behind it. This is why I think there'll be multiple winners in this space, because nobody's gonna be able to market to a million SMBs. But many companies could likely market to hundreds of thousands and millions of SMBs out there. So I do think marketing is... Once they get them to try, I do believe as long as it's performant, they'll stay, and they'll take a certain share of that performance budget, and they'll switch to CTV. You gotta get them to try it, and that's where marketing and awareness comes in. That, and we're focused on that. We have marketing budgets behind that. We have inside sales teams who are doing this right now.
This is relatively new. It's got a typical new product ramp. I love it. It's going up and to the right. New advertisers are coming on every day to try this out. We're starting to get more data on repeat and performance and how they're doing. We're integrating with measurement companies that help the advertiser measure causal-based lift analysis. We can pixel sites. We can do APIs that allow us to do all these measurements. But in the end, I do think there'll be multiple winners in this space because of the ability to have a great UI and marketing. And then I, I'll just end by saying, even for the other companies that do very well in this space, like we'll integrate with them as a publisher....
Because of our sheer reach, our sheer size, our ability to geo-target. Like, so even though Ads Manager, our product, will win in this space, I think there'll be multiple winners, and we're gonna benefit from all of them because as a publisher, they'll integrate, and they are the ones that are out there already are integrated with us, just like the DSPs are all integrating with us. All these, call it, these ad servers, these mini DSPs focusing on SMBs, they're also integrating with us. So we'll win when they win as well.
Interesting. I mean, is this, is this more of like a multi-year needle? Like, is this, is this a potential 2026 needle mover, or is it-
It's a typical product launch. Awareness matters. It's seeing the trajectory of a typical product launch, where you're building more and more, and I suspect others in this space are doing similar. They're building more and more. And I think that over time, you know, we'll have to wait and see how it plays out, but I do think over time, you know, this will be a- it could be. In my opinion, it could be a double-digit percent of the share of the overall performance market. But yes, it'll take some time, mostly from the awareness and making sure the UI is awesome, right? It's gotta be simple. It's gotta be five clicks. I'm just making this up. It's gotta be like, hey, you just five clicks.
You put in a credit card, or, you know, you have invoicing, and instantly you're up and running. It can't be complicated.
Right. Shifting over to M&E. So Roku's M&E business has faced headwinds, but we are seeing some encouraging signs. Sticking onto the sports, there have been several new large sports streaming services launching, and I can personally say I've seen some advertisements on my own Roku home screen. So, you know, how do you see the segment evolving, and, you know, could this potentially return to growth in 2026 and beyond?
Yes. First of all, we appreciate you being a Roku customer, so I'll start by that. We love it. So M&E is an interesting area. You know, M&E during the you know, coming into COVID and at the height of COVID, a lot of M&E was focused on subscriptions as the number one driver, and, I mean, this is no secret, like, literally overnight, they changed to, "Hey, we need subscriptions, but we also need to be profitable," and that impacted a lot. M&E continues to be a challenged market for us in terms of it's still a big market. We're still the one of the best places for M&E to spend dollars, but the overall market of itself is not growing anywhere close to, say, how the platform revenue is growing.
That being said, you know, it still is an area that we want to see the growth pick up. We're always working on new ways to do this. Part of our subscription initiatives, this isn't M&E per se, but part of our subscription initiatives, which we haven't talked yet about, is to grow the subscriptions that we monetize. That is a combination of through M&E, but just signing up on the Roku platform as part of either premium subscriptions or just signing up through our Roku Pay, so we monetize the subscriptions. All these are initiatives on how we partner well with the M&E companies. It's far more than just the ads, but the ad piece of it still continues to be a one that's focused on profitability.
And yes, the new distribution, the new content companies that launched, Fox One, the new ESPN+, is certainly an opportunity. Yes, I also think within the subscriptions network and potentially for M&E, I think bundling as a platform could be a big initiative where we can help these companies reduce churn and grow their subscriptions. Maybe there's M&E involved in that. It's an area that we focused on, but yeah, it's not growing like the platform business is growing.
Got it. So shifting to subscription, that's another part of the business you're very bullish on. So, you know, what are the key drivers for subscription growth? And, you know, you obviously just did the Frndly acquisition. You announced Howdy. How does that fit into the strategy there?
Yeah. So just to really pivot from M&E, like, one of the most important initiatives we undertook in the platform monetization was to diversify our advertising base and our overall platform revenue base and focus on subscriptions. This is why M&E, as a percent of our overall platform, is far less now than it was in 2022, and it's why, despite the industry challenges, we are still able to grow so much on platform revenue, and if M&E ever did pick up to its COVID heydays, we'd be, you know, the best place to advertise on, but part of this initiative was to diversify away from M&E with new ad products and with our overall investment in subscriptions.
So subscriptions is a very exciting area, and I do get the question, like, "Well, why subscriptions?" Like, what, you know, "What- why are you investing in a Frndly?" or we launched a very economically priced SVOD service called Howdy, which we launched earlier in August. The answer is because it goes back to that hidden asset. Like, we have this UI, this amazing asset in the home screen and the entire UI of the platform, and we believe, in fact, we know that we can drive more subscription volume through our UI. So having some owned and operated subscriptions just makes a lot of sense because one of the biggest challenges for any content company is marketing, is distribution.
That's what we can give a subscription company is distribution on over half of broadband households in the U.S., for example. So Frndly was growing when we bought them. We believe we can grow them even faster because of our unique asset that we're talking about. It's a great product. It's a very inexpensive virtual skinny MVPD with over 50 channels. Very popular channels like Hallmark. I think we just added A&E, History. It's a very popular service at a very good price point for those who wanna stream. And so our goal here is to take Frndly and integrate it more into the platform. And how do you do that? It's not just more marketing, more distribution.
You integrate them into our search, for example, so they can show up more in search results. That content row I talked to you about, we can do that from a personalization for folks that we think wanna watch Hallmark. We can put them up into the personalization, the personalized content row at the top, and drive more volume that way. We can add our demand, add inventory on their supply, and help them fill some of their supply, which may be different reach than just Roku in and of itself. Like, there's multiple things that we can do. There's some easy ones too, like our rate card for web services or cloud services, you know, those sorts of things, like some of the easier ones that we'll integrate over time.
So there's just a lot we can do to accelerate the growth of their SVOD subscriber base, which is actually, you know, which is a decent size. Like, they're doing very well.
Interesting. Shifting over to costs. So that's been a big focus of you since you've you know been at Roku. You've targeted being operating income positive in 2026. You're also you know well on track to do operating expense growth of mid-single digits. You know longer term you know where do you see margins of this business going?
Yeah, great question. I get this question a lot. And so let me talk about, like, where we've been and where we're going, and I'll answer your question. So in 2023 , we said at the start of 2023, we said we'd be EBITDA, adjusted EBITDA profitable in 2024 . We were able to eke out, I think it was $4 million of adjusted EBITDA in 2023 , which is great for the full year. So we exited on a great run rate, and we were profitable, adjusted EBITDA profitable for the full year. I was very proud of the company and the team that spent a lot of effort to get there. And we did it early, a full year early.
In 2024, we did about $260 million of adjusted EBITDA. So again, I think we surpassed our own internal expectations, primarily from the growth at the end of the year on the platform revenue, but also on all the cost initiatives that we put in place. We said we were gonna be operating income positive in 2026. Our guidance actually implies we have the potential to do that, you know, a little early with the Q4. We'll see where that comes out. I, you know, my hope is and my expectation is we can actually hit operating profit positive in Q4. We'll see on that, as we go, as we get into the quarter.
So, we guided to $375 million, our latest guide, of adjusted EBITDA on our platform revenue growth. That brings EBITDA margins to around 9%. We've gone from 0% two years ago to ending the year at roughly 9% on adjusted EBITDA margins. We'll get to double digits soon on adjusted EBITDA margins. I've made, I've not hidden the point that we're gonna continue to be very focused on our cost structure. I think I've said many times, I expect mid-single digits in our OpEx growth rate, and a lot of the investment that we're doing in all these amazing initiatives are reallocation of capital within the business. So we've been able to do this without a lot of incremental OpEx growth. I do expect that to continue.
Again, we'll hit double-digit EBITDA margins in the near term. We're gonna be op profit positive in 2026, as I mentioned. I do think op margins will continue to grow. At some point, can't say when, we'll be double-digit op profit margins. That's absolutely my goal.
I guess with that, you have inflection in free cash flow as well. I know that that's, you know, you've said multiple times that's your North Star. You know, you've recently announced a buyback program, I guess in addition to what you've normally done on net share settlement, but you've also been, you know, active in M&A. How should we think about your capital allocation priorities from here?
Yeah, great question. Our absolute North Star is free cash flow and free cash flow per share. We, we look at stock-based comp very closely. We've done net share settlement, which is an effective share buyback, where as shares vest, we pay the taxes in cash rather than sell stock. So that's offset dilution by about 40% of what dilution otherwise would be, and now we've announced a $400 million share buyback. We're executing on that share buyback. My ultimate goal is to get dilution to zero. It might take some time to do that as we continue to grow our free cash flow, but that's my ultimate goal is to keep dilution close to that, as close to that 0% as possible.
Again, I'll provide more guidance to that once we get through a couple of quarters on the share buyback and where we're at on it. But the free cash flow is very positive. I've said in 2025 , free cash flow is gonna be higher than adjusted EBITDA. We're very CapEx light. You know, I don't cap- we don't capitalize R&D, unless it's over a threshold, and so a lot of our EBITDA is a good proxy for us for free cash flow, and we expect free cash flow, you know, because of the CapEx light model that we have. So that, that's all real positive, and we're always looking, you know, for acquisitions that help us drive monetization and help us grow, on our strategy.
And so we did Frndly. We launched. We didn't buy Howdy. We are doing some really interesting and fun initiatives that we think will help us grow on the platform revenue side. But yeah, we're gonna continue to offset dilution with the cash that we generate. We have over $2.2 billion of cash on the balance sheet. We have no debt. We're in a great position to continue to do what we're doing.
Great. Wanna sneak in at least one hardware question. So you guys have built this really strong position, approximately half broadband households in the US. You know, Walmart acquiring Vizio. You know, how should we think about Roku's share of new TV shipments today, given that, you know, you guys are now the incumbent in many cases, and implications for market share going forward? You know, how should we think about that?
Sure. Are you, are you referring to Walmart specifically, just so I understand the question?
Like Walmart, Vizio, selling TVs.
Got it.
Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah, it's a good question. So, first of all, we have the benefit of being number one in this space, and number one by a lot, like I said, over half of broadband penetration, and that is continuing to grow. I expect that to continue to grow in the U.S. and globally, so we're in a great position. Walmart's a great partner with us. You know, I believe we'll continue to sell in Walmart. You know, I do believe that Walmart will sell SmartCast. That is not lost on me at all. I think that will continue to happen. But we will continue to spend on sales and distribution. I'm not planning to spend more than we can't currently spend.
We said in our last quarter, we spent hundreds of millions of dollars on sales and distribution. It's one of the reasons we've been able to grow to this incredibly powerful position in the market in terms of streaming households. We'll continue to spend that. We'll spend it with our distribution partners. More distribution partners have been opening up recently, which has been great for us. You know, I also would say that our player business is an amazing business, where any hardware can instantly be turned into a Roku TV by putting a $30 dongle in it. That business continues to perform very well, just, you know, to whatever equipment the streamer buys. But most importantly is our streamers love the operating system, our operating system.
Like, we didn't become number one because for any other reason than our streamers love it. It's simple. We're gonna keep it simple. It's effective. We put a lot of R&D into the operating system. We invest a lot into making it an exceptional streamer experience. We're asked for by name as streamers come in and buy their hardware. So I think we're in a great position. Notwithstanding the acquisitions, we're in a great position to continue to grow our share, and I think we've said publicly that we are on track to hit $100 million soon, likely in 2026. And that includes continuing to grow in the U.S., so expanding on that greater than 50% broadband share that we already have.
Great. We got thirty seconds left, so I guess we'll sneak last one in here. I guess putting all this together, a lot of irons in the fire. We're sitting back here in three years, you know, which of these opportunities that we discussed are you, you think were, you know, gonna be the biggest surprise to all of us?
I think that it's... That's a good question. I think in three years, I think there are many aspects of things that are gonna happen that we're not talking about here. I will say, like, I am very excited about Roku's position in the marketplace that we're at, inclusive of being number one, and how we monetize it. There are things that we're not talking about that could potentially be huge monetization initiatives in three or four years. Think gaming, as an example, on what that could mean for CTV. This performance market that we're talking... Sorry, this SMB market that we're talking about, like, I don't know where that's gonna be in three years. I know it's gonna be more than it is today, and I think it could be significantly more.
I don't know how dynamic the auctions are gonna be in three years. Is GenAI gonna be a bigger player in the auction market versus, you know, all the ML auctions that are going on? I don't know. What I do know is, because of our scale, because of our reach, and most importantly, because of our execution on monetization, I think we're gonna benefit from all of it. I think it's all good news for Roku on where this market is going, and I like to say internally, like, we've become very good at skating to where the puck is going. That's how we've gotten this programmatic space that we're in now.
That's why we've opened up to all DSPs, when, you know, at the time, we were like, "Hmm, is this the right thing to do?" And it was absolutely, it's the right thing to do. That, that's worked, and I think there's gonna be more of these initiatives three years from now that we're not talking about today that are gonna put us in a great position. I'll just end by saying, having scale in this space is incredibly important. You do not wanna be number four or number five in this space. You wanna be number one, maybe number two, and we've got the benefit of being number one in the U.S., being number one in Mexico, being number one in Canada. We're growing in Brazil.
We're growing in the rest of Latin America, and that's just a great position to be in for this space.
That's great. Can end it on that, and-
Thank you!
Thank you so much.
Enjoyed it. Thanks, guys. Thanks for coming.