International Keynote: Anthony Wood | RTS Cambridge Convention 2025

That's right.

Yeah, well, I didn't like the term 'gateway' because I feel like a big part of our business is partnering with our partners and helping them, as opposed to being a gateway. Roku is the number one streaming platform in the United States, Mexico, Canada, most of Latin America. The Americas are really where we've focused; we're a little bit in the UK and that's growing. The numbers are a little bit different actually: we have closing in on 100 million households, which is probably two or three hundred million people because there's multiple people per household. Those are active Roku customers. It's about half of Americans use a Roku device, whether it's a TV or a streaming player, to watch television. Roku is about 45% of streaming hours in the United States, meaning 45% of Netflix and YouTube and all that on televisions flow through our platform. 20% of all TV viewing in the United States is Roku, because not all TV viewing is streaming. So that's just a sense of our scale. We're growing quickly. There's our business: there's really two parts. One is we're a streaming or TV operating system, a platform, like the way Android or Windows is an operating system for phones or PCs. Part of our business is growing the scale of that platform, and we do not make money doing that—we lose money doing that. We spend a billion dollars a year distributing devices around. So that's on the hardware side: just on devices, getting our hardware out there, and we don't make money on that. So part of our business is growing the scale of our platform; in the UK, that would be getting our TVs in Currys, which we have like 15 different models of Roku TVs in Currys for example. But the biggest part of our business is what we call our platform business, which is the monetization part: subscriptions and advertising. We distribute streaming services and get paid for that in various ways. Usually, when we convince a customer to sign up for HBO Max, they'll build through our billing platform and then we'll get a share of the revenue. That's one way we do subscriptions. Another way is aggregation of streaming services into one unified user experience, which we call premium subscriptions. Amazon calls that Amazon channels. That's a big trend. Then, we have a multi-billion dollar advertising business—traditional TV advertising with large ad agencies and top 200 brands. We distribute a lot of free content; in fact, we aggregate free content onto our platform. We call it The Roku Channel. It's the number two app on Roku: number one is YouTube, number two is The Roku Channel, number three is Netflix. The Roku Channel includes linear FAST channels as well as on-demand free content that we put ads in, and we sell those ads. That's a big ad business for us. We also have our own and operated services. We just launched a new SVOD service called Howdy, which is $3 a month and no ads, for great TV content. So, that's our business in a nutshell.

The streaming players were born in Netflix. I started Roku with the goal of doing streaming platforms, but the world was not quite— the technology was not there. Internet was not quite fast enough, so it wasn't quite ready for that yet. We made other products: streaming audio products, products for HD TVs. Then, Netflix back then was doing DVDs by mail. This was in like 2007. I introduced myself to Reed Hastings who ran Netflix. I would go visit Reed and say, 'Hey Reed, you should let Roku build a streaming player. You guys are called Netflix. You should do internet-delivered television.' He said, 'We're working on internet-delivered television. It's not ready yet.' I tried to convince him to let Roku build a Netflix streaming player. He ultimately said, 'No, we're just going to do it ourselves.' I said, 'Okay, I'll do it for you if you let me just keep running Roku. I'll come help Netflix build your first streaming player.' He said, 'Okay.' I thought that was pretty creative on his part. I went to Netflix, was an employee there for 9 months, built the streaming team, built the streaming player. I also started licensing Netflix, so I did a deal to get Netflix on Xbox, a deal to put Netflix on Samsung. Reed decided that was better than building their own hardware. He said, 'Why don't we take that team you built? We'll spin that out, put that inside Roku, and we'll just license Netflix and put it in everything.' And he fired me, basically. I said, 'This is great. This is what I've always wanted. Thank you very much.' So, the original Netflix Roku streaming player was called the Roku Netflix Streaming Player, built mostly inside Netflix and then finished inside Roku. We shipped it, it sold really well. My plan was never to be just a Netflix player; it was always to build an operating system for TV. So we kept doing software updates: added Amazon Prime Video, then the app store, then universal search, and kept adding features to build it into the operating system it is today. People often ask why Roku is the number one streaming platform. Is it because you were first? We were early and the first Netflix player, but that's not the main reason. The main reason is we built a software platform operating system designed for television. In the history of computing platforms, it's always the ones designed for the new platform that win. DOS went on PCs because it was designed for PCs. Windows didn't become the phone operating system; Android and iOS won. Roku is the number one streaming platform because we designed it just for TVs. It has a lot of advantages: costs less to build a Roku TV, simpler, easier, with features designed to help promote content and build audiences. So, it's really designed for television, and that's ultimately why we're successful.

I always knew we were not going to make money selling hardware. But in the early days, the scale wasn't big enough. When we first shipped, there were two Netflix players: one was $50 and one was $99. Now a Roku streaming stick costs like $15 on sale and it's way better. But we funded the company by selling hardware initially, but that quickly went away. As we built scale, we started testing different monetization techniques on the platform, and we discovered the ones that work best are selling subscriptions, billing, and advertising. Those became big businesses, and now those businesses pay for the device business and the platform business. That's the reason streaming players cost $15: they're subsidized by the platform business.

Roku is one of the largest connected TV advertising platforms in the US. The way it's changing: there are a few different ways. One, it's a traditional business with ad agencies and large brands. The way TV ads are traditionally sold is with premium content like sports or originals as the temple that gets advertisers, then bundling longtail content. Roku doesn't buy sports and does few originals. For us, the premium ads we lead with are ads in our user interface, like a video ad on the home screen that everyone sees before Netflix or YouTube. 120 million people a day see that ad. We have other ads like Roku City, which is a popular screen saver with ads. So, we lead with UI ads as opposed to content ads. The other big thing is embracing DSPs: like social media, delivered through targeted platforms called DSPs. In the US, the biggest DSP is The Trade Desk. We just signed a deal with Amazon; they're getting into DSP and I think they'll be successful. We're leaning into DSPs, and the vast majority of TV ads on our platform are delivered through DSPs—targeted, measured. For example, if Procter & Gamble buys ads through The Trade Desk, they'll put some on Roku, some on Amazon, some on Samsung, tracking across platforms and measuring results. It's a much more data-driven, targeted, measured way to deliver ads, measuring ROI, and advertisers are moving in that direction.

So, DSPs are a big trend driving our business. The other interesting thing is the self-serve platform Roku has called Roku Ad Manager. Let's say you're a fish and chip shop in Cambridge and you want to run a professional TV ad like a Procter & Gamble ad. You can go to our website, log in, say you want to run an ad, target Cambridge and a mile around your chip shop, target people who like fish and chips, and ask to make an ad using AI. It'll generate a professional, high-production-value ad from your website images and information, and run it targeting those people. It'll measure if they go to your website and the cost per click. This is now available to local small businesses, which are the vast majority of advertisers on social media. It makes high-quality television ads available to that customer base, selling direct to small and medium-sized businesses. That's a big new segment; it's still small but already close to $100 million and growing extremely fast. This new business for ad-supported television didn't exist before; it's possible with AI and will take money from social media to TV.

A lot of fish and chip shops in the UK. As you know, you were born in Manchester, right? You've got a lot of British family. Acklesfield.

Yeah, we have an office in Cambridge. About 300 employees.

Yeah, I mean we have an office here, we have one in Manchester, we have engineering offices in different cities. I personally just love Cambridge. I've been coming here for a long time. I spent a summer here. I know there are a lot of really smart engineers here. Frankly, they're super smart but they get paid less than Silicon Valley engineers. I don't know why they do it. They work for half the price. So, it's an incredible office. It's a great team and we have an office here.

We're going to keep growing our offices, but our offices are not really so much about supporting the UK market as just our global engineering effort. We are starting to lean into the UK. We're now in 15 different TV models at Currys, all the major retailers in the UK. Our market share in the UK is really starting to grow. Our goal is to keep growing and become the number one operating system in the UK just like we are in the Americas.

Well, it was so in the US. It's alien. In the US, if I go to a US conference, there's no one from the government. And they don't talk about the government or their regulators. So that's completely different. The other difference is the BBC is supported by the license fees—I guess you could call that a subscription business. The other public service broadcasters are all free. In the US, there's nothing that's free. I mean, YouTube is free, but everything else is part of a subscription bundle. That's a different dynamic. A lot of the issues being talked about like how do I get placement on YouTube doesn't exist really if you're part of a subscription bundle because you just don't put your content on YouTube generally. You might put some on there a little bit as advertising. So, it's a different dynamic.

Um, it can create that issue of just listening to your echo chamber for sure, that's a danger. But it's also extremely good at recommending content that you might want to watch, so it creates a... so, I mean, it's here to stay. It's not going anywhere. Whether there should be regulation, I'm not sure.

I don't know. In my world, it's all streamed right now. I don't have a date for that. But it's pretty clear that the world has moved to streaming and it's just going to keep moving to streaming. One of the biggest issues with streaming for incumbents is it's just a much more competitive environment. That wasn't actually discussed on the panel, but the root cause of the issues is a lot more competition. There's a lot more competition because now, before both in the US and the UK, the number of brands and broadcasters was constrained by the spectrum and the number of TV channels. In streaming, that doesn't exist; there's an unlimited number. Whenever that happens, it creates new companies—that's why Netflix was created, why there's Amazon Prime, why YouTube was created. So there's a huge disruption happening; it's much more competitive and that's hard to navigate. But I think the advantage that UK companies, the local public service broadcasters, have is they have powerful brands. They have a lot of content that people love, and it's really just how do you take those brands and move to a streaming environment. I would say you have to embrace it. Regulation might be part of it, but really to win, ultimately you're going to need to embrace the streaming world and figure out how to make your brand bigger. It's a bigger platform actually.

Well, for example, one of the things I was talking about before—at least I'll talk more about televisions. In terms of televisions, which is where most streaming happens, it's popular on mobile but most streaming happens on televisions, and that hasn't changed much. Most long-form streaming, and even YouTube now, is closing in on majority on televisions. The platform on televisions is an important way to be part of that platform. How do you use that platform to market and build audiences for your brand? One of the big trends is that platforms are consolidating. Television platforms are consolidating. It used to be that almost every TV company had their own streaming platform. It's not really viable to do that in a world where we spend almost a billion dollars a year on R&D and growing, and so do our main competitors, which I view as Amazon primarily and a little bit Google TV. We advertise almost 100 million households. I think we have like 40 different TV brands we work with. That ability to advertise across a lot of different TVs, and the ability to use that growing scale to generate more platform revenue to subsidize the cost of the hardware and R&D, that virtual cycle is driving consolidation. Samsung used to be the largest TV platform in the US; they're not even close anymore. Almost 40-45% of all TVs sold in the US are now Roku TVs. There's consolidation happening; the economics require it, and I think we're going to be down to probably two, maybe three TV platforms eventually. The other kind of consolidation is with apps: YouTube is an aggregator, and the ability to have your own app is only for a few companies. Ultimately, to exist on a platform like Roku and have enough scale to get customers to click on your app and spend time in it requires the scale of a Netflix or YouTube, maybe Disney Plus, probably Amazon Prime, very maybe BBC, but other than that, it's going to be a very small number. Instead, what's happening already is we're seeing content brands aggregated by the platform into a single UI, and the platform does a lot of marketing and promotion to drive audiences. Roku does that; we call it premium subscriptions. Amazon does that; they call it Amazon channels. It's the fastest growing way to build audiences for a brand. We don't have premium subscriptions in the UK yet, but we'll be launching it in the UK soon. So, what happens is, if you're a streaming service, you have three main costs: content, marketing, and tech, and the tech is a huge expense. So is marketing. If you put your content on premium subscriptions or Amazon channels, we'll handle all the tech like best-in-class streaming experience and all the marketing—put ads on our home screen, drive traffic to your content, drive viewing, work on reducing churn. We do that for a living. We'll focus on that, and you'll do the content, and it'll be a wholesale relationship. I would say think seriously about that. That's the future of every company I saw up here except maybe the BBC. It's a future where you don't have to build your own tech, your expenses are lower, you can focus on making great content, and we want to work with you because we only make money when our content partners make money. If you don't sign up for a service, we don't get paid. We have a lot of skills and want to work with companies to help build audiences. That's one way I would say to embrace it.

With all the PSBs? Oh yeah, of course we have, I hope, good relationships. We carry all their apps. We don't have premium subscriptions yet in the UK, but when we launch it, we'll of course go talk to them about it.