Page 48 - Forbes - USA (December 2019)

CONTRARIAN TECHNOLOGY

By Angel Au-Yeung Photograph by Timothy Archibald for Forbes

Roku Redo

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S More than a decade after being beaten by TiVo, Anthony Wood became a
R
O billionaire with cheap streaming gadgets. That business has never turned a profit.
T
P Roku is now betting its future on a model that’s as old as TV: advertising.
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S
I
D

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C
E
T

ers are said to loathe: advertising. Master of Reinvention
It’s a necessary pivot. Roku’s original business, Serial entrepreneur
Anthony Wood at the
selling inexpensive dongles that let TV viewers Los Gatos, California,
tap into the internet to stream 500,000 movies headquarters of Roku.
The name means
and TV episodes from Netflix, Disney and many “six” in Japanese, a
nod to his half-dozen
more, is a low-margin one that has never turned a business ventures.
DVRs and Netflix have taught profit. Even worse, streaming has become a com-
a generation to hate television commercials. An- modity, with streaming apps integrated into any-
thony Wood should know—he created one of the thing that can get online, from PlayStation con-
first DVRs that allowed viewers to skip commer- soles to tablets to smart TVs.
cials, and he also worked briefly at Netflix, directly Wood, 54, is now betting that Roku will be able
under its cofounder Reed Hastings. But Wood’s lat- to move beyond its hardware business into a more
est pivot, in the midst of the streaming media revo- lucrative software business: measuring the reach
lution, has been to bet the future of his streaming and effectiveness of ads on streaming apps.
device company, Roku, on the very thing consum- “Traditionally, the only way you would measure

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