Our story

It started with a love of television
and a belief that TV could be so much more.

In the mid-1990s, Roku founder Anthony Wood had a problem: how to record his favorite TV show, Star Trek: The Next Generation, without the frustration of physically taping each episode and managing a growing collection of VHS tapes. After spotting an ad for hard drives in his local newspaper, Wood was inspired and invented the digital video recorder (DVR).

But in solving one problem, Wood saw an opportunity to solve others: What if it were easier for viewers to watch what they want, when they want? What if there were a better way for more creators to deliver great content to the audiences they want to reach? And what if marketers could unlock greater value by combining the power of TV with the precision of digital advertising?

In the early 2000s, more than 80% of households in the U.S. were connected to traditional pay TV services offering hundreds of channels. While some might have assumed that the future of television had arrived, Wood believed that the internet held the potential to transform TV.

To make that vision a reality though meant that the television itself would need an operating system.

This led Wood to create the world’s first and only purpose-built TV OS, transforming the television set from a simple one-way receiver into an internet-enabled device connecting viewers to a growing library of content available online. With a mission to bring together and benefit the entire TV ecosystem, Roku launched its first streaming player in 2008.

The Streaming Revolution now had a platform.

Viewers loved it. Within six years, the company sold more than 10 million devices. Roku now has tens of millions of active accounts worldwide. Roku’s U.S. active account base has surpassed the number of U.S. video subscribers for all cable companies combined. And Roku is the No. 1 TV streaming platform by hours streamed in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico (Hypothesis Group, Oct 2021).

Programmers and content creators loved it. The years since Roku launched have witnessed, by far, the greatest explosion in content creation in history. Today, thousands of scripted and unscripted TV shows are distributed in the U.S. alone, along with tens of thousands more produced for audiences around the world. Many movies are produced with streaming audiences as the primary target. And creators of all types are finding opportunities to produce and distribute content over streaming platforms, finding audiences they would never have been able to reach before. Roku, too, is building its place in this blossoming creator economy through The Roku Channel, featuring our growing library of Roku Originals and hundreds of free linear channels. The Roku Channel is a Top 5 channel on the Roku platform in the U.S. by both Active Account reach and Streaming Hour engagement (as of Q2 2022).

Advertisers love it too, as they follow viewers to TV streaming. Roku’s ad platform is built for TV streaming and is differentiated by its significant scale, continuous innovation, and first-party data. In 2020, Roku launched OneView, a demand-side advertising platform built for TV streaming that enables advertisers to combine TV streaming’s broad reach with the ability to serve more relevant, personalized ads.

However, as incredible as this transformation has been, the Streaming Revolution has only just begun. Today, only a portion of the world’s 1 billion broadband households are streaming. There continues to be a significant gap between the TV time consumers spend streaming and the budget advertisers spend on streaming.

But make no mistake: The trend is clear. We believe that in the rapidly approaching future, all TV and TV advertising will be streamed. In fact, by 2028, analysts expect 1 billion more internet-connected TVs to be sold globally.

This transformation will accelerate as more and more TV manufacturers adopt a licensed operating system. Just as operating systems unlocked the full possibilities of the personal computer and mobile phone, Roku’s purpose-built TV OS is leading the way to transform the television, making the experience of watching TV easier and more joyful for everyone.

As more content and ads move to streaming, our licensed OS will give customers access to content they want at prices they can afford, while content creators will find new audiences and ways to engage them.

This evolution will be a time of boundless opportunity for the entire TV ecosystem. Driving it will be the same spirit that started it all. An engineer’s love of problem-solving. The creative desire for more and better content. A conviction that immense value remains waiting to be unlocked. And underpinning it all, a fundamental love of TV. Now, we’re reinventing it—in ways that will make the lives of billions more entertaining, more informed, more rewarding, and much, much more fun. 

Happy Streaming!