Anthony Wood, founder of Roku and former VP of Internet TV at Netflix, recounts the origins of Reed Hastings's decision to spin off Netflix's hardware project.
Insight
Wood: Nonprofits Are Less Accountable and More Wasteful Than Companies
“It's actually very difficult to give away money effectively because there's less accountability versus a company. Like if you imagine putting money in a nonprofit versus putting money in a company, well, the company is measured and is very motivated on being e…”
Assertion Partly supported
Wood: ReplayTV burned $20M monthly and missed its IPO window
“You know, even though we raised two hundred million dollars plus the burn rate had cranked up and we were spending, you know, I remember some months it would be twenty million dollars a month. The thing that changed the dynamic is they went public Before us, w…”
Prediction Not checkable as stated
Wood: US TV Advertising's $80B Market Will Entirely Move to Streaming
“You know, there's, I don't know, 70, eighty billion dollars a year spent on TV advertising in the US alone, and it's all moving to streaming.”
Opinion
Anthony Wood: Selling iBand for $36M felt like selling out
“And looking back on it, selling a company for 30, whatever million dollars is quite successful, but that's not the way it felt. Like I wanted to build the real company. I didn't want to just make the money. It felt like I had sold out.”
Assertion Supported
Wood: TiVo used dot-com funding to subsidize DVRs at $99
“TiVo, then Teleworld, decided that they would take advantage that this was like in the dot com boom. They would take advantage of the fact that they could raise a lot of money. They raised a lot of money, and then they started subsidizing the DVRs. Yeah, so th…”
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Wood: Hastings allocated 3% of Netflix revenue to background streaming R&D
“And so he actually told me once that he, you know, I, I've allocated, I'll call it three percent of our revenue to keep working on this idea of streaming in the background so that we don't miss the transition.”