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Concept
Roku
Summary
Roku (ˈroʊkuː ) is a brand of hardware digital media players manufactured by American company Roku, Inc. headquartered in San Jose, CA. They offer access to streaming media content from online services.
The first Roku model, developed in collaboration with Netflix, was introduced in May 2008. Roku devices are considered to have popularized the concept of low-cost, small-form-factor set-top boxes for over-the-top media consumption. Roku has also licensed its platform as middleware for smart TVs.
As of September 2022, Roku has 65.4 million active accounts.
Roku was founded by Anthony Wood in 2002, who had previously founded ReplayTV, a DVR company that competed with TiVo. After ReplayTV's failure, Wood worked for a while at Netflix. In 2007, Wood's company began working with Netflix on Project:Griffin, a set-top box to allow Netflix users to stream Netflix content to their TVs. Only a few weeks before the project's launch, Netflix's founder Reed Hastings decided it would hamper license arrangements with third parties, potentially keeping Netflix off other similar platforms, and killed the project. Fast Company magazine cited the decision to kill the project as "one of Netflix's riskiest moves".
Netflix decided instead to spin off the company, and Roku released their first set-top box in 2008. In 2010 they began offering models with various capabilities, which eventually became their standard business model. In 2014, Roku partnered with smart TV manufacturers to produce TVs with built-in Roku functionality. In 2015, Roku won the inaugural Emmy for Television Enhancement Devices.
The first Roku model, the Roku DVP N1000, was unveiled on May 20, 2008. It was developed in partnership with Netflix to serve as a standalone set-top box for its recently introduced "Watch Instantly" service. The goal was to produce a device with a small footprint that could be sold at low cost compared to larger digital video recorders and video game consoles.
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