Forbes - USA (2019-12-31)

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46

Roku Redo

Photograph by Timothy Archibald for Forbes

More than a decade after being beaten by TiVo, Anthony Wood became a

billionaire with cheap streaming gadgets. That business has never turned a profit.

Roku is now betting its future on a model that’s as old as TV: advertising.

CONTRARIAN TECHNOLOGY

DECEMBER 31, 20 19

ers are said to loathe: advertising.

It’s a necessary pivot. Roku’s original business,

selling inexpensive dongles that let TV viewers

tap into the internet to stream 500,000 movies

and TV episodes from Netflix, Disney and many

more, is a low-margin one that has never turned a

profit. Even worse, streaming has become a com-

modity, with streaming apps integrated into any-

thing that can get online, from PlayStation con-

soles to tablets to smart TVs.

Wood, 54, is now betting that Roku will be able

to move beyond its hardware business into a more

lucrative software business: measuring the reach

and effectiveness of ads on streaming apps.

“Traditionally, the only way you would measure

DVRs and Netflix have taught

a generation to hate television commercials. An-

thony Wood should know—he created one of the

first DVRs that allowed viewers to skip commer-

cials, and he also worked briefly at Netflix, directly

under its cofounder Reed Hastings. But Wood’s lat-

est pivot, in the midst of the streaming media revo-

lution, has been to bet the future of his streaming

device company, Roku, on the very thing consum-

By Angel Au-Yeung

Master of Reinvention

Serial entrepreneur

Anthony Wood at the

Los Gatos, California,

headquarters of Roku.

The name means

“six” in Japanese, a

nod to his half-dozen

business ventures.

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