Going live here. Okay. All right. Welcome, everyone. Thanks for coming to our media post-launch session with Roku. I'm excited to introduce Dan Jedda, who's the CFO of Roku. Dan, welcome.
Thank you. Happy to be here. Appreciate you having this.
Maybe just to start off on, you know, you recently reported results and gave guidance. 2025 was obviously a great year for the company. Platform revenue grew 18%. As you look back at the fourth quarter and the full year, what were the key initiatives that really went right and to drive that performance for the company?
Right. Let me go back two years and just set that stage. As we exited 2023, we right-sized our cost structure. We spent basically the second half of 2023 right-sizing our cost structure. We felt very good about that exiting 2023. In 2024, in our Q4 2023 results that we discussed in February, we made it very clear that we're really going to pivot our attention towards the platform monetization of Roku, and specifically in both areas of how we monetize, meaning subscriptions and advertising.
What happened throughout 2024 and really in the H2 of 2024, and then we saw a full year benefit in 2025, is just the execution of all the initiatives that we undertook to really focus on the monetization of the platform. I'm sure we'll get into a lot of those initiatives during this chat. It really was important for us now that we had built a massive scale in the U.S. and in our focus countries outside the U.S. of 50%, over 50% broadband penetration, approaching 100 million streaming households, that we turn our attention to monetizing that scale. I mean, it was very expensive for us to build this scale. It costs a lot of money to get distribution. We had done that, and we continue to do that.
The pivot was really on driving more demand in advertising, driving more subscriptions, and we undertook a whole lot of initiatives to really double down in those areas. You saw the result of that in multiple fronts in 2025. Again, I'm sure we'll get into a lot of them, but there is a lot that's going right in all these initiatives that we can talk about further. We feel very good about our results in 2025, and as importantly, we enter 2026 in a very good position.
On the call, you got it to over 21% platform revenue in the first quarter and about 18% for the full year. Is this just conservatism or are there other factors that we should consider about, you know, the growth rate for the full year relative to Q1?
Right. So, yes, in Q1, we were just over 21%. I believe it's 21.5%. For full year, we got it to 18%. In 2025, we did just under 18%. We got it for that, basically, similar growth rate, slightly higher growth rate for 2026. Let me talk about Q1, and then I'll talk about full year. A couple of things happening in Q1. First of all, Q1 of 2025 was our easiest comp, our lowest growth rate for 2025. We had progressed on growth rate throughout 2025 sequentially with higher year-over-year growth rates in Q2, Q3, and Q4. It's a relatively easy comp in Q1 based on Q1 of 2025.
Mostly it was due to the higher growth rates due to the frndly acquisition, which we closed in mid-Q2 of 2025. Q1 still has that year-over-year comp of frndly tag to it. You've got a slightly easier comp. You've got frndly for the full year of 2026. No frndly in Q1. Sorry, of 2026. No frndly in Q1 of 2025. That's for Q1. It's a very healthy growth rate even if you back out frndly. For full year, we got it to 18%. What we said on the call was we wanted to wait for H2 to understand political a little bit more. There's obviously a big political season coming up in 2026. It's a midterm year. I suspect it will be similar to a general election year.
That's what all indications are telling us so far. We just said, like, we want a little bit more time and more insight into H2 for 2026. Yes, the H2 of 2026 is conservative from that standpoint.
Okay. Great. Let's talk about margins. You got it to mid-single digit OpEx growth. That's driving significant EBITDA margin expansion. At the same time, you're still investing in key initiatives. How are you balancing the financial discipline with the need to invest and stay ahead of the competition? Where are there still major opportunities to drive operating leverage in the business?
Right. We ended 2025 at just under 9% margins. It's roughly a 250 basis point improvement in EBITDA margins in 2025. Our 2026 guide implies an even faster margin expansion. I believe it's 267 basis points for our guide for 2026. We're getting great leverage. What we're seeing is, first of all, our platform business continues to grow double digits, the guide of 18%. We've guided to OpEx margins of mid-single digits, as you noted. We've guided to platform margins of roughly flat on a year-over-year basis. All that leads to EBITDA margin expansion. It leads to operating margin expansion. It leads to free cash flow margin expansion. All positive.
What we're seeing on how we invest is we're still investing. We're investing in owned and operated subscriptions. We're investing in ad product. We're investing in bringing more demand to our platform. We're investing in bringing more ad demand. We're invested in bringing more ad supply to platform. Like, we are absolutely investing in the monetization initiatives. We're still investing in growing scale, which is very important for us. We're very disciplined at looking at our investments, and we're focusing on targeting the highest ROI investments in whatever initiative we undertake. That may mean externally adding headcount, but it may mean that we pivot a headcount internally from certain areas into higher investment areas. It's not as if we're not hiring. We are adding headcount, we're hiring, but it's very targeted.
For example, like in AI related areas, especially in advertising subscriptions, we'll hire. There's other areas where we're focused on efficiency and automation, so we don't have to hire. All this is very. It's a very conscious effort to ensure we're investing, but we're investing in the highest ROI initiatives. We're running very fast where we have to, where things are a land rush. But in areas that are more about scaling, we're focused more on automation, efficiency, AI for efficiency purposes. All this leads to where we believe that in a sustained way, we can continue to grow our platform double digits while maintaining that mid-single digit OpEx growth. Now, again, like, that is a significant investment still.
Like, we have over $2 billion of OpEx, and so growing $2 billion at mid-single digits% is still a lot of investment. It's very targeted to the highest ROI initiatives.
Platform revenue grew 18% last year. Can you just talk about what drove that growth and maybe talk about the growth of subscriptions and advertising?
Platform revenue growth grew just under 18% last year. We guided to 18% this year. We don't break out advertising and subscriptions. We've given data points on this in the past. I said on the Q4 call that I wanna give our investors more data points on this. Basically, on a go-forward basis, starting with our Q1 results, we will break out our platform segment into two different businesses. We're gonna break it out into advertising and subscription. That's something we've been working on for a while. I'm very excited about it. We're gonna give historicals, of course. We're gonna give the growth rates.
We're gonna give the margin structure of our platform business in the form of two segments, call it subscriptions and advertising. That's something that's new to us and something I'm very excited about. Again, we've been working on this for a while, so we will start this in our Q1 results. Now, to answer your question specifically on the 18% for 2025 and how we grew subscriptions in advertising. Subscriptions grew 25% in 2025. We have to remember that there was a Frndly comp in there, so that's inclusive of not having Frndly in 2024. The advertising business in 2025 grew 13%, but that's comping political of 2024.
If you back out political, it's 19% year-over-year growth rate, so very strong advertising growth rate in 2025. If you were to back out Frndly, if you were to back out advertising, in both areas, they're both roughly very similar in terms of growth rate, both growing very well. The advertising business is growing much faster than the CTV ad market, which is a positive I would expect to continue.
Great. That new disclosure will be really helpful.
Yeah. We're very excited about it. We think it's gonna help our investors. We'll talk more, you know, we'll give more data points on this, but it's something, like I said, we're very excited to do.
Great. You've guided to platform gross margins of 51%-52% this year. As the mix shifts towards subscriptions and programmatic advertising, what are the primary puts and takes that are gonna influence gross margins going forward? What gives you the confidence to project double-digit operating profit margins in the near term, long term, excuse me?
Right. You know, we've targeted that. We've leveled out at 51%-52% gross margin. We ended closer to the 52% in 2025. We're trending well to continue in that 51%-52%. Now, since I told you we're gonna break out subscriptions and advertising, let me talk a little bit about the margins on each and give you some data points on that. Again, we'll talk more about this in Q1. I've often said that it is mix that is driving the margin structure, depending on what's growing faster within all our different activities. They have different margin structures.
We have everything from 80% margin activities, you know, to 30%-40% margin activities, depending on what's driving it. Our subscription margins are, you know, just north of 40%. They're doing well, and I suspect that will continue in that range. Our advertising business is just north of 60%. Subscriptions has trended down slightly. Advertising has been remarkably resilient. Again, you'll see this when we do historicals. I would expect that to continue to be resilient just because of all the initiatives that we have not only to drive demand, but the optimizations that we have to drive margins. We don't focus just on platform revenue.
We focus on cost of goods sold as well, and we're able to utilize our platform to maximize our advertising margins. I feel really good about the margin structure of both businesses. They'll, depending on the growth rates of each, they will mix out to that 51% and to 52%. I think it'll be closer to 52% than 51% because advertising is doing so well. To answer your question specifically on programmatic, I've addressed this in the past. There's this thought that the shift to programmatic leads to lower advertising margins or a reduction in CPMs leads to lower advertising margins. That's not true. I've said this time and time again. Just because someone shifts to programmatic doesn't necessarily mean it's lower margins. We have multiple different margin structures.
We have a home screen that is very high margin, that's doing very well. We put video in our home screen. What used to be a static display ad, we have now added video to it. It's a very high margin ad unit. Like I said, we focus on optimizations within video advertising, so we can optimize for the highest margin ad sales first and then, you know, go down from there depending on how much demand we have and the campaign performance goals. So, if CPMs continue to trend down, and we're not seeing that, but if they did, it wouldn't impact our ad margins. It wouldn't impact our ad revenue. If the shift continues to programmatic, and I think it will, I'm sure we'll talk about that.
I don't believe that will impact our ad margins. We have incredibly resilient ad margins. They've actually trended up slightly over the last several quarters and feel very good about them.
Great. Maybe you could talk about premium subscriptions and how those have been trending?
Right. Premium subscriptions are trending very well. It is the driver of our overall subscription business. The difference between premium subscriptions and what I would say direct-to-consumer subscriptions. Our premium subscriptions are embedded throughout The Roku Channel and throughout the user interface, which we control and we own. Whereas, a direct-to-consumer subscription is where you go into the app and you sign up. We monetize both. The difference is premium subscriptions can have a much better user experience and be embedded throughout the UI that we have, throughout TRC, which just means there's multiple ingress points into the partner app. It's something we are investing in. It's something which is growing exceptionally well. We have multiple tier ones in premium subscriptions.
We announced HBO in late last year. We're seeing the benefit of that in 2026. We just announced Apple TV as a premium subscription. That is a tier one partner. We'll announce more tier ones in the future. I feel very good about the pipeline of our partners that want to come on to premium subscriptions. We also launched premium subscriptions outside the U.S. We launched them in Mexico, and we won't stop there. We'll eventually launch in other countries as well. You know, premium subscriptions is something our partners want to do. It will lead to incremental sign-ups.
It's something that we think is a better customer experience as well because of how we can use it to personalize our home screen and our user interface. Again, premium subscriptions is one of the many initiatives we have in our subscription business that's driving that 25% growth I talked about for 2025. Again, I would expect premium subscriptions to continue to be very strong in 2026 and going forward.
Okay. The acquisition of Frndly and the launch of Howdy, they seem to signal an expansion into owned and operated subscription services. You believe you can accelerate their growth by leveraging the power of the platform. What's the broader vision here? Is the goal to have a larger portfolio of O&O services? Where are you in fully integrating these services into the broader business?
Right. I mentioned two types of subscriptions, the direct-to-consumer and the premium subscriptions. Owned and operated subscriptions are a third. We have three ways that we look at subscriptions. They're all doing very well. Our owned and operated subscriptions, meaning Howdy and Frndly, are doing exceptionally well because again, similar to premium subscriptions, we can use the power of our platform to market those subscriptions. You know, if you look at like, let's take Howdy for example. There's two relatively high-cost areas for an SVOD subscription. It's content and marketing. Well, that marketing is not really an obstacle for us. Marketing is very expensive on platforms to drive subscriptions.
It's not for us because, again, we control the UI, we control the home screen, we control the entire platform. We can utilize that as our marketing to drive subscriptions into Howdy. Because our marketing is relatively inexpensive, it's a form of opportunity cost only, and because we can utilize that, we can launch a product that has really good content but not a high price point. We think that is an underserved area of the market. We think there are many streamers out there who want to have an ad-free, low-cost SVOD service with good quality content, and that's what Howdy is. It's doing very well on our platform. We've talked about taking it off Roku. We will do that. We've talked about taking it outside of the U.S. We will do that in the relative near term.
It's working very well. Frndly is similar. Frndly is a virtual MVPD bundle that has TV on it, has live TV on it with over 50 channels. It is relatively low cost. Again, marketing is a big expense for a company like Frndly, an SVOD service like Frndly, and that's what we can do very well. Frndly also is on our platform throughout the entire UI, showing up in multiple cases. We're driving subscriptions to Frndly. Frndly also is off Roku. You see more and more services going off Roku. That's a strategy of ours. Even though we have broad scale, we have over half of broadband households, we feel that we can take these assets and be successful with them off Roku as well.
Both are doing very well. They're both very strategic for us. Like I said, with Howdy, we'll bring it outside the U.S. We'll bring it off Roku soon. Frndly TV already is off Roku, and it's just part of our overall subscription strategies, and again, a big driver or a driver of that 25% year-over-year growth rate.
Okay. Let's talk some more about the revenue growth drivers. Like to get your perspective on the health of the overall ad market, in particular CTV. In the past, you've noted that while the broader industry has had pressures, Roku's ad business has done remarkably well and growing faster in the overall U.S. OTT and digital ad markets. You also mentioned seeing positive pricing trends in your most recent upfronts. I think that was a change from the prior year. As we look ahead, what are the key trends, you know, you're seeing from advertisers? You're seeing budgets continue to shift from linear to CTV, and are you seeing any acceleration there? If you could comment on those.
Yeah
topics, that'd be great.
We're absolutely seeing budgets shift from linear to CTV. Let me take a step back and let me talk about the overall market because there's always this thought that there's a lot of supply in the CTV market as more and more platforms and streaming partners have ads and grow their ad business. That is true. There is more supply. There's a reason for that. It's because all the demand is shifting over to the CTV market. Let me just put some numbers, because I actually think this is very important, is to be in a market that's growing is an absolute benefit and privilege, which I love. We're in a market that continuously grows, mainly the CTV market. Let me put this into context, and I'll reference some external data.
Roughly the overall ad market, linear plus CTV in the US is around $90 billion, maybe slightly north of that, depending on which company that puts out the data. It's roughly $90 billion. Of that $90 billion, about a third has moved over to the CTV space. What you have. By the way, you know, many years ago, that was all linear for all intents and purposes. Now you've got a third of that budget moving over, and that's growing double digits. What a great position, what a great market to be in, is the one that's growing double digits. That's call it a 33-ish billion-dollar market and growing, whereas the linear is now $60 billion and shrinking.
A lot of those hours have already shifted over from linear to digital. A lot of thought was like, "Hey, there's this. The concept of sports is gonna keep eyeballs in linear," and that was true, but not all sports has shifted to digital. Every single sport, essentially, that was linear only is now linear and digital concurrently. There are many sports and which will become even more prevalent that are digital only. If you think about football, I like to use the NFL as a guide. They go back eight-nine years ago, it was all linear. Now it's all linear plus digital with about 8% being digital only. The only way to watch the game.
Right
is on digital. You've got the sports is still there for linear, but you have the eyeballs that have shifted, will continue to shift. It's like, two-thirds of the hours have shifted, only a third of the budget. That's gonna correct itself over time. You're going to have the CTV market continuing to grow at double digits. On top of that, because of the way you can do performance advertising on CTV, you have the performance budgets who are starting to move over into CTV. That's an entirely new market and a new tailwind into the CTV market. Now, performance markets, depending on how you define performance with search and social, it's $100 billion-$150 billion. I like to think about it as the SMB market.
That SMB market spends about $600 billion on all forms of advertising in a given year based on external data. Again, the true performance piece of that is, call it $100 billion-$150 billion, depending on what you include in that. That market is also shifting over into CTV because CTV now can be performant. It is not just the top 200 brand advertisers that are focused on massive reach. You have a performant-based ad products, which we can talk about, like our ads manager, which are getting those SMBs to come over via self-service and be able to do what they've always wanted to do, which is to put a video on TV, the CTV, and then measure the performance similar to how they can measure the performance in some of their performance channels.
You have two tailwinds coming into the CTV market. You do have shifts to programmatic going on. I think that's a positive. Ultimately, who I think is gonna win in this CTV market that's growing are the products and that are ultimately the most performant, which is something we talk a lot about. We wanna be the most performant platform for the ad market out there. That is something that we can do because we know our customers. Everybody on Roku is logged in. We know them all. We have amazing first-party data. We can integrate other data. We ingest other third-party data into our platform to understand it.
We're building and have built many performance-based ad products that take advantage of not just the shift to programmatic, but the fact that there's these performance-based budgets coming into the CTV space. This is a very exciting time to be part of the CTV space because, again, it's growing. Not many markets are as sizable as CTV and growing double digits. Again, my expectation is we will grow faster than the overall CTV market.
It's a great walkthrough. Maybe you could just talk a bit about, you know, you've pivoted from a closed OneView centric approach, this open interoperable strategy. You've integrated with all the major DSPs, or you are integrating with them. Amazon, which you noted is in the early innings, is a particular interest. What have you seen in the early days of the partnership that really informs your view of how it will contribute in 2026 and beyond?
Right. That's a great question, and it's one like I said, let me take a step back and go back three years ago. Three years ago, if you wanted to run via a DSP on the Roku platform, you essentially had to come in through the Roku DSP, which as you correctly stated, was OneView. It was a company that was purchased several years earlier. We had this notion that, hey, like, let's be a DSP. Any advertiser who wants to run on a DSP, that's fine, but you have to run on our DSP. Well, that was very limiting because there are other DSPs out there which advertisers were already running on and/or agencies were already integrated with.
In 2023, as we looked at our supply of ad inventory, which because of The Roku Channel, which is the number two app on the platform, was growing so fast because, again, the power of the UI, we realized, like, hey, we don't have a supply problem, and quite frankly, it's not that difficult for us to create more supply in terms of ad inventory. We have a demand problem. We don't have enough demand coming in. Again, as part of the two thousand...
Late 2023 and into 2024 initiatives, we said, "Let's not close advertisers off by saying, 'You have to come in through our DSP.' Let's open it up to all demand-side platforms and SSPs, for that matter." What we did is, and again, it takes time to get these contracts out and integrate them and build the plumbing and then optimize. What we said is, like, "We wanna meet the advertiser wherever they wanna transact. If you wanna transact directly with Roku, we'll do that. If you wanna transact through a DSP, we'll do that as well. Anybody who's transacting through SSPs, like, we'll do that as well." We opened up our platform and said, "Let's integrate with all DSPs." But that wasn't. That was never the plan to just do that. We wanted to integrate deeply.
Like, this really was a change in strategy for us. We wanted to go as deep as the DSP wanted to go, and every DSP is different, depending on how they look at their own performance. Amazon's gonna be different than The Trade Desk, which will be different than Wurl, which will be different than DV360, which will be different than Yahoo. We said, "Hey, let's go as deep as we can with all the DSPs." With The Trade Desk, it meant adopting UID 2.0. With Amazon, it was a different level of integration, and we will go deeper with all of them, and we'll continue to optimize. What that resulted in is more demand coming into our platform. Of course, that demand has to perform, which it is. We brought more demand into the platform.
We also added more ad product to drive more demand. We continue to add more ad product. That'll drive more demand. As this shift goes, again, to programmatic, we're in a very good position because we are integrated with all the DSPs. Again, that shift to programmatic, that DSP integration doesn't mean margin degradation. That was something I tried to really make known early on because the thought was, well, if you're integrating with DSPs, your margins will go down. No, that's not how it works. Because you're integrated with DSPs as a publisher and as a platform, our margins don't necessarily go down for a lot of different reasons which I won't get into.
We, again, you'll see when we report our Q1 that the advertising margin has been incredibly resilient over the last many quarters, and I would expect it to continue to be on a go-forward basis. Same with CPMs. Because you're going into DSPs doesn't mean CPMs decline. What we said on our Q4 call was that we did not see CPMs in our latest upfront continuing the decline that we had seen in previous upfronts. That is true. There might be a shift in guaranteed versus non-guaranteed, which may shift CPMs to some extent because guaranteed versus non-guaranteed have different performance metrics.
Neither are going to necessarily either make margins higher or lower, because we can optimize across the platform for a consistent advertising gross margin.
Roku Ads Manager seems to be a key long-term driver, going after the SMB market that you mentioned. Your team noted 90% of advertisers on the platform were new to Roku. How big of an opportunity you think this is over the next three-five years?
Yeah. I think that is a significant opportunity. I mean, between Ads Manager and our subscription business and the shift to programmatic, like, those three areas are very significant for us. I think Ads Manager is, you know, probably could be on top of that, although the others are significant as well. The reason being is, as I said, unlike five or seven or eight years ago, we have removed the largest barriers for having an SMB advertise on CTV. The two barriers were one was performance. Can CTV be as performant as the performance markets that they were already spending dollars on? Two, there was just an obstacle to creating a quality video ad. Well, Gen AI removed the latter obstacle altogether.
Like, creating a video ad is now instantaneously through GenAI. We have a product on this. We integrate with others. You can use our product. You don't have to. You can upload your own video, which again, there are multiple companies who do this. I think that's just gonna get better and better. That's here. That's now. A GenAI video is now. That obstacle is now gone. The second obstacle of being performant is also gone, or at least is eroding because you can get many of the KPIs that you want in your performance advertising channels on CTV now. How do we do that? Well, multiple ways. You know, you can pick your KPI as you come on the self-service model.
You know, call it, you know, anywhere from four-eight clicks, and within minutes. You can pick your KPI, you can upload or create your video, and you can be advertising with where you wanna advertise, whether it's geo-targeted, whether it's I wanna maximize site visits, I want conversion data, I want overall reach. I wanna be on multiple publisher platform, publisher content sites. We do all that through the UI interface. How do we do this? Well, we do it via APIs. We do it through pixeling. We do it through third-party measurement companies. We do it through integrations with ad companies like Shopify.
There's multiple ways that we can now measure the performance, and that performance is getting better and better, which again, I believe will continuously keep the performance budget shifting into CTV. It's a very exciting time for the SMBs to be able to do that. We can do everything from site visits to causal-based lift analysis, like I said, to conversion data, depending on the SMB. I would say right now it's more of the M than the S, but I have no doubt that it's gonna migrate down to even the small business. 'Cause remember, like, $600 billion is spent by SMBs in total advertising.
Why would you not want to carve out a chunk of that on TV on a performance metric so you can get your video out in front of millions and millions of people and see if it performs as well as some of your performance measurement that you have in your other channels? I think it's a huge opportunity. Imagine, like, take a hundred to a hundred and fifty. Even if 10% of that were to get carved off and move over into CTV, that is significant. I do believe there'll be multiple winners in that. Roku, not only do we have the self-service product, but we have the platform and all the publisher agreements to be able to buy across an entire platform. That's
We've got the scale, we've got the agreements lined up, and now we have the self-service interface. We have marketing tech to this. We have inside sales tech to it. Like, we're basically getting these SMBs aware that we have this performance ad product, which is trending very well.
The new home screen design is one of the major initiatives for this year. You've said it will drive both engagement and monetization. Can you give us more detail on the new ad units or the monetization levers that the design will unlock? How should we think about the timing of the rollout and the financial impact? What are some of the major learnings from the testing that you've conducted so far?
Right. We're being very methodical. Obviously, this is a big initiative for us. For a long time, the home screen was relatively static, and that was very intentional. Roku customers love the simplicity of the home screen. One, like, that is a tenet. Like, we want the home screen to be simple for our users, and that will continue to be. We did make some changes, you know, a couple of years, call it 18 months ago, where we put a content row at the top. It's an ML-based content row, highly personalized, which is driving a lot of monetization. It's driving more engagement. It's driving more monetization. We also made some changes on the left nav.
We added video to the ad unit on the right of the home screen. We've done homepage takeovers now for advertising. All this is a way to say we've been working on the home screen to drive more engagement and, very importantly, to drive more monetization. It's one of the inputs that we have where we realized we were under-monetizing this incredible asset that we own, meaning the home screen and the UI. The redesign is something that we're very excited about. It's much more broad. It's much more methodical. We're still testing it. We've tested multiple variations. We're still learning. We will slowly roll it out, meaning that the variations on it will roll out over time because we want to call it the boil the frog approach. Terrible analogy.
We wanna be methodical about how we roll this out over time. I know that this will lead to more engagement. It will lead to more monetization. We're not focused on, like, flipping a switch, like instant monetization. We're focusing on long-term, over the long-term monetization. We're building in a way that can incorporate multiple changes, which is. It's not just V1 I'm excited about. Like, I'm looking at V2 and V3 and how we evolve the home screen over many years, because again, it's such a unique and competitive advantage for us and a huge asset that we have. Now, to answer your question, you know, we're looking at the left nav. We're looking at the layout.
We're looking at the way the grid is laid out. Like, I'm not gonna give it away because we're still fine-tuning it. I will say that I'm confident that the new home screen will focus both on engagement and monetization because if it didn't, we wouldn't roll it out, and we are gonna roll it out. So we really like what we see. We're seeing good user feedback in this testing. It's not quite there yet. Again, we're doing some more testing, some more fine-tuning. It's going to be an over time approach, but it won't be, you know, it won't be a long time before it comes out. We don't have a date yet, but it will happen.
Okay. Let's move to international. You've achieved scale in markets like Mexico and Canada, and now you're focusing on monetization while still building scale in other markets like Brazil. What does the pathway to monetization look like abroad? Are there any key takeaways from the more mature international markets that give you confidence in your ability to monetize that next wave of countries?
Yeah. I talked about this before. We're at different levels of the monetization initiative on our international locations, and I'll give you some examples. Again, you know, international is starting to pick up. It's starting to grow as we would expect it to grow just given that we have scale in many countries. For example, in Mexico, where we have incredible scale, it actually rivals the U.S. in terms of scale. The ad market in Mexico just isn't as, it hasn't moved over as quickly as the ad market has in the U.S.
Even how slowly CTV has moved from linear, Mexico is even slower and is nowhere near the penetration in terms of its movement from linear to digital in terms of advertising. Although we're starting to see that now and we're starting to see more ad monetization in Mexico. What we can really monetize via scale is our subscription business, which again, is a very important focus for us. We are seeing subscriptions start to do very well in Mexico. It's one of the reasons why we launched premium subscriptions in Mexico. Again, we will launch Howdy in Mexico in the near term. We are very focused on subscriptions as right now. Advertising is coming. That's Mexico.
Pivot over to Canada, where we have less scale than Mexico, still incredible scale. We're the number one CTV seller in Canada. We have incredible scale, but that ad business is doing very well. We are focused not only on advertising, we're focused on both advertising and subscriptions in Canada because that market from an advertising perspective is quite mature. That's an area which is actually really doing well in advertising. It's starting to do well in subscriptions. We'll continue to invest in subscriptions in Canada. Brazil, where we're really in the heart of building scale, is not being monetized a lot. We still monetize it. We have some M&E. You know, we'll announce new initiatives in Brazil because its scale is really starting to take form in Brazil.
Again, we have to get that scale first. That's a country where it's just farther behind from the monetization initiatives. All this is to say international is a key focus for us. I believe it's going to continue to grow and grow well. We're building scale in these countries. We'll continue to build that scale, and the monetization will follow just like it did in the U.S.
Okay. I wanna touch on the question of, you know, Walmart acquiring VIZIO, other major players investing in their own OSs. How has your view of TV distribution evolved? What does the launch of Hiro and 4Q mean for your distribution strategy in 2026? Why is doubling down on developing your own TV the right decision?
Yeah. Let me talk a little bit about our overall distribution strategy, which is absolutely working. Let me give you some details on this. About two years ago, Walmart purchased VIZIO and put VIZIO OS front and center, and they're continuing to migrate to VIZIO OS. You can see that as you walk into Walmart. That will continue. You know, we've known about this for some time, of course. Our goal always has been to focus on diversifying distribution. We have $ hundreds of millions that we spend on distribution.
You know, one of our key roles is how do we optimize that spend for the lowest CAC or cost per acquired customer possible. Our entire distribution strategy has been really focused on continuing to be at Walmart, which we will, but just also looking at other areas of distribution. You mentioned we launched a first-party TV called Hiro at Target, doing very well. We launched Pioneer with Roku OS at Best Buy, doing very well. Our distribution strategy and our share at Amazon continues to grow not just with first-party TVs and players, but also our third-party OEMs. We're in regional distribution centers now, which are performing very well for us and continuing to add Roku streaming households.
On our OEM side, we've struck new OEM agreements with many OEM partners. We announced two of our largest, TCL and Hisense. Let me tell you why that's important. One of the reasons why our OEM partners wanna partner with us is not only is our brand so well-recognized from the customer perspective because we're asked for by name, Roku TVs are asked for by name, but our BOM cost, our component cost, our bill of materials cost, is one of the lowest BOM costs in all the OS plays. Why is that? It's because the Roku OS is a purpose-built TV OS which operates on the lowest cost memory footprint of any OS. That was very strategic in how Roku built its OS early on.
Where that is important now is in the rising memory cost environment, of which is definitely happening. The OEMs want to work with Roku more now than ever because of the BOM cost they get. Not only do we have $hundreds of millions of investment that we're focused on distribution, including retailers and OEMs, now the OEMs have a lower BOM cost. Taken together, they are very incented to work with Roku and sell Roku because it's a win for them. It's obviously a win for us. We have this diversification strategy across all the distributors. We're doing well with our OEMs. Like I said, we just signed two new agreements. We're adding SKUs with our OEM partners.
We have our player business, which we sell millions of players that can turn any smart TV into a Roku TV. That's doing very well. We actually have a 15 dollar player right now where you plug into any smart TV and instantly you have a Roku TV. For us, like, it really does it from a monetization and a streamer experience perspective. It doesn't matter if you have a player, if you have a first-party TV or you have a third-party OEM Roku TV. They all monetize the same, they get the same experience, and we're agnostic on all that. All that diversification, all the distribution strategies with the OEMs are continuing to sell at Walmart.
You know, we believe, and we've stated very clearly, I've changed from approaching 100 million to nearly 100 million streaming households. We will surpass that milestone at some time in the near future. We feel very good about our distribution strategy.
We'll make this the last question. I'll give you a choice. You can either talk about AI and how does Roku use it to create durable competitive advantage rather than, you know, just something that everyone uses and it just levels the playing field or talk about capital allocation and your plans there.
Well, I think AI is very strategic. Capital allocation, like, we're very free cash flow positive. We're buying back stock. We're offsetting dilution. Free cash flow will be higher than EBITDA, which not too many companies can say. Like, free cash flow is doing extraordinarily well. I made it very clear that, or I actually even said that we plan to be at $1 billion of free cash flow by 2028. I often don't talk about path beyond the current year, but I feel very confident that we can be $1 billion of free cash flow by 2028 if not sooner. Let me in the last minute or two, let me talk about AI because it's very strategic. AI is an absolute tailwind for us.
It's not a risk or a headwind. Forget, I mean, first of all, we're using AI for operational efficiency. I can see it in my team. We all have AI goals. We're not adding headcount in my team. We're adding automation. We're adding AI. We're using agents to do analytical work. All that is happening, and it's happening not just in my group, of course, but across all of Roku. But where AI is really important is I already mentioned, SMB with Ads Manager and using Gen AI to create video. That's to create a short-form video. You know, AI will ultimately be impactful in long-form and short-form content. Howdy and other partners of us will be the beneficiary of that. We'll have more hours of engagement on our platform. We monetize engagement.
That's a positive for us. Within advertising, as I mentioned, our goal is to become the most performant OS, operating system platform out there for advertising. How do you do that? You do that with AI. AI embedded through all of our advertising tech is where we're moving towards. That's what we're building right now. AI will be a tailwind for the ad business. It will be a tailwind for content. It will be a tailwind for operational efficiency, and we see the benefit across all the different areas for Roku. It's a huge positive for us and something that we absolutely embrace and we think is gonna be significant, especially as everything moves to programmatic in the ad world.
Yeah. It's a great place to end. Thanks, Dan.
Appreciate you having me.
Thanks, everyone, for coming.
I enjoyed it. Thanks for coming, everyone.