Life Is But a Stream
The next time you click your remote and go to Netflix, there’s a good chance that Anthony Wood will have made it possible. Wood, the founder, chair, and CEO of Roku, is a pioneer in the industry of streaming, bringing all manner of programming—movies, live sports, television reruns, and more—into your living room via a free streaming service, stand-alone devices like the Roku Express, co-branded smart TVs, and the operating system inside internet-connected televisions from Sharp, Hitachi, and Philips, to name a few.
A serial entrepreneur, Wood was the founder, in the late 1990s, of ReplayTV, where he invented a technology that allowed users to skip ads and pause live television: the digital video recorder, a completely disruptive innovation that is now ubiquitous. He also briefly served as vice president of internet TV at Netflix, helping the company transition from solely offering mail-order DVD rentals to offering streaming as well. Wood sat down with Alta editor and publisher Will Hearst to discuss the future of streaming. (Disclosure: Hearst was a board member of ReplayTV and owns shares in Roku, a publicly traded company.)
WILL HEARST: There’s been a huge shift in the way people consume media, especially video. It’s still on a screen. It’s still narrative stories, documentaries. But it’s no longer just TV screens. There’s a massive shift to mobile. Roku chose the television, and that gives you special focus. I’m curious how you look at the television versus the phone.
ANTHONY WOOD: Right. As a business, we picked the big-screen TV. We built an operating system, or a platform for televisions. We have apps to pick channels, available on phones or laptops and on Roku devices. But our focus is the big screen. If you look at the data on streaming, what you’ll find is, laptop and phone streaming are mostly incremental. People watch more TV now than they used to, and the vast majority of their viewing, at least in the U.S., is on big-screen TVs.
HEARST: Really?
Once there were mainframes. Each had their own operating system. Then there were PCs, and Windows became the licensed OS for PCs, and then Apple had its proprietary solution. Then when phones became platforms in their own right, Android became big because it was purpose-built for phones, while Windows’ transition to phones never caught on. Then if you look at televisions with a built-in operating system, which is what we
