Forty-one percent of the attempted streaming connections for Sunday’s 55th Super Bowl occurred on the Roku platform, according to research published by Conviva.
In terms of how many consumers used what connected TV platform to stream the big game, market share broke down kind of as you’d expect (see chart below)—Amazon Fire TV ranked No. 2, with 24% of streaming starts, followed by Apple TV (12%), Samsung TV Plus (8%), Xbox (4%) and PlayStation (4%).
What surprised us was what a non-factor Android TV/Google TV remain, despite the rapt attention we’ve paid to the evolution of the platform in recent months. Android TV commanded just 4% of Super Bowl streaming starts, according to Conviva, while Google’s legacy Chromecast platform owned just 1%.
With Roku and Amazon mired in distribution disputes that kept Peacock and HBO Max off their device platforms for most of 2020, LightShed Partners analyst Richard Greenfield predicted in July that Google would soon end its long drought of connected TV success.
“We believe Google’s lack of success in the TV ecosystem is set to change radically in the next 6-12 months, led by an updated Android TV UI and a reimagined Chromecast,” Greenfield wrote.
Google debuted its overhauled and rebranded version of Android TV, which it calls Google TV, along with the new Chromecast with Google TV device, back at the beginning of October.
So far, based on this small bit of Conviva research, it doesn’t look like Google has been able to make a sizable dent in U.S. connected TV market share.
