Joker, Elf Among Top Roku Searches In 2020

Roku has announced their Q4 gains for 2020, revealing that the streaming platform concluded the year with 51.2 million active accounts — up by approximately 14 million accounts in the year. In addition, Variety reports the biggest titles searched for on the platform by users throughout the year with feature films Joker and Elf among the most popular. The hit TV series Yellowstone was far and away the most searched for though, holding the "top spot" on the platform from June through September. The company also announced an estimated 17 billion streaming hours in the fourth quarter for a total of 58.7 billion hours in 2020, an increase of 55% year over year for the quarter and the full year.

"I'm excited that more than 50 million households now turn to Roku for their TV viewing," Roku CEO Anthony Wood. said in a statement. "The world is moving to streaming and we look forward to continuing to help viewers, advertisers, content publishers and TV manufacturers succeed in the Streaming Decade."

The full list of most popular titles per month includes:

January: "Joker"
February: "Frozen II"
March: "Contagion"
April: "Trolls World Tour"
May: "Scoob!"
June: "Yellowstone"
July: "Yellowstone"
August: "Yellowstone"
September: "Yellowstone"
October: "Hocus Pocus"
November: "Elf"
December: "Elf"

In their press release, Roku revealed that the cord-cutting trend is set to continue throughout the US with their 2020 data revealing that one third of U.S. households have cut traditional pay TV. They note that eMarketer predicts that by the end of 2024, fewer than half of U.S. households will subscribe to a traditional pay TV service.

One thing that no doubt spurred new users for Roku was there finally being a deal in place to bring the HBO Max streaming platform to the devices. WarnerMedia and Roku brought HBO Max to the platform on December 17th, just ahead of the premiere of Wonder Woman 1984 on the streaming service.

Roku made headlines this week though when it was announced that they were in "advanced talks" to purchase the catalog of original content from Quibi, the short-lived streaming service that launched and folded during the previous calendar year. This comes after reports in October had indicated that Quibi reportedly tried - and failed - to sell its content and its company to companies like Apple, WarnerMedia, and Facebook. It perhaps seems unlikely that this time next year that any of the Quibi shows will be on the top 2021 streaming titles.