According to Bloomberg report, Roku is preparing to go public later this year.   Bloomberg reporter says that a decision to move ahead hasn’t been made, and the Saratoga, California-based company hasn’t selected a lead banker, according to one of their sources who requested anonymity because the discussions are private.

The Roku player leverages video from Netflix and Amazon for Internet TV (aka cord cutters).    According to researchers Roku has the lead over Apple TV as a percentage of households who stream media from the Internet.  Additionally, Roku licenses its technology to other manufacturers.

Roku has raised a total of $127 million in funding from investors.  Investors include News Corp., Menlo Ventures, Globespan Capital Partners, Netflix and others.

Roku has been seeing lots of competition from Goolge Chromecast and Apple TV and a move to go public could increase their source of capital.   Here is a comparision of the three big players:

Can Roku Win?

Based on the specifications above, Roku  has the edge when we’re purely talking about content – with over a hundred channels available it leaves Apple and Google for dust.  Apple isn’t too shabby with 14 content partners signed up, but with only Netflix and YouTube it’s clear that the Chromecast is very far behind and a has a lot of catching up to do.

Roku has an opportunity to position itself as a pure play Internet TV company to piggy back the run that Netflix is on.   Last year, Roku unveiled its latest streaming box, the Roku 3, and although similar to its predecessors, it packed some significant internal upgrades. Roku has always valued function over form, and their latest device shows that there’s been no departure in that mentality.

SiliconANGLE contributing editor John Casaretto recently described it as one stop search functionality. Detailing how it works, he said, “It can take searches, and search all the different services, and all the different channels that are on it. It orders the search by services that you subscribe to, and those that you don’t. It can order it by price, and it even has a tag that says if the movie you’re looking for is HD or not.”