Anthony Wood: How Roku Prospers In An Apple-Google TV Invasion

NOTE: This week, I have profiled entertainment leaders who use technology to form new models for their industry. See the other profiles here, here and here.

These days there's a lot of buzz about Apple, Google and Microsoft in the TV space. But while they are all crawling the carpets of TV disruption, Anthony Wood's product, Roku, is now ten years old.

Here's another number: Roku means "six" ... as in the sixth company Wood has started. None of them is trivial. Look at Wood's bio page.

In the early days of Roku, Anthony also served as the vice president of Internet TV at Netflix, where he developed what is known today as the Roku streaming player, originally designed as the original video player for Netflix.

Prior to Roku, Anthony invented the digital video recorder (DVR) and founded ReplayTV, where he served as President and CEO before the company's acquisition and subsequent sale to DirecTV. Before ReplayTV, Anthony was Founder and CEO of iband, Inc., an Internet software company sold to Macromedia in 1996. The code base developed by Anthony at iBand became a central part of the original core code of Macromedia now known as Adobe Dreamweaver.

This is all to say that if you had to bet on Roku's survival, its leader is the reason to go "yes." Recently Wood told the "TV of Tomorrow Show" that his brain-child the DVR is dying. The same could eventually happen to set-top boxes, like Roku, if Smart TV takes over. Here's why that is okay with him.

Wood had a fairly simple concept from its inception: Offer an affordable, unobtrusive device that streams as much content as possible. Though some punted cable/satellite thanks to Roku, the box was meant to augment regular TV watching. The average Roku owner now streams 12 hours of television per week, compared to 35 hours of overall average TV watching.

"It's gone well," Wood says in a telephone interview. "We've sold more than 3 million devices and its rapidly growing."

The critical point that keeps Wood relaxed while tech behemoths stomp into his space: They're stomping, primarily, with the device in mind. As my colleague Michael Kanellos points out, "The sad truth of the matter is that hardware is ultimately a vehicle. It exists ... to ferry information from server A to consumer B."

Wood gets that.

"Our goal is to be a distribution platform for television directly from the Internet," he says. "And we're focused on building scale, because in TV you're only relevant if you have a large number of customers."

Wood says there might be a day when Roku exists device-free. So even if Google and Apple do to Smart TV what they did to Smartphones, Roku would hardly be irrelevant. It's building a content platform that would be much easier for hardware makers to invite in than try to replicate. The latest example addresses a pet peeve of mine -- that TV can't travel internationally with more ease. Roku recently partnered with DISH to create DISHWorld service, "with more than 50 international channels to the Roku platform in the U.S. – including the leading Hindi, Arabic, Urdu, Bangla and Brazilian channels."

That kind of platform and partnership can work anywhere. But Wood didn't seem 100 percent convinced Smart TVs would take over the world as quickly as some have predicted.

"When you look at the current numbers, Roku streams about twice as much as Smart TVs do right now," he says. "That's because people don't by a TV for its smartness. They buy it for screen size and image quality. And you have the update problem, where people replace their computers every two to three years, whereas its six to eight years for TV. So upgrade could be an issue. But there may be a solution for that, and if so, we have a strategy for it."

The question is whether the Smart TV space will have  greater variety of adoption than phones.

"Just like Windows is the PC alternative to Apple and Android is the mobile alternative to Apple," Wood says, "we see ourselves as the TV alternative to Apple."

That sounds like Roku might pit itself against Google, which it does already to some extent, but partnerships are also a possibility. Roku's Board of Directors includes Robert Kyncl, a key player at YouTube for Google, and there's no reason both platforms couldn't create a very effective symbiosis on devices someday. (This is me guessing, not anything Wood mentioned.)

Microsoft is another matter, because XBox Live is building a great platform as well. Whether Microsoft ever intends to translate that into a Smart TV platform is unknown, especially since the migration is complicated by the gaming element.

Wood doesn't talk like your average tech disrupter. His voice is softer, he avoids jargon and he speaks more slowly. And that might have a little to do with why he and Roku don't get the buzz from observers others do. But with what he's been able to build to this point, it's an oversight the actual participants wouldn't want to make.