Tim Twerdahl, Roku's VP of Consumer Products

Written by Steve Donohue

Wednesday, May 6. 2009 at 03:30 PM EDT 3 comments

Digg   Del.icio.us   Reddit   Email This

no ratings

1 saves

• Login to Rate

In this interview with Contentinople, Roku Inc. vice president of Consumer Products Tim Twerdahl discusses the company's plans for adding new content to its set-top box, and why watching streaming video on Roku is a better value than viewing it through your local cable operator.

Contentinople: Why do consumers need Roku? Can't they get most of the content they need through cable or satellite?

Tim Twerdahl: They can get some of it. They can't get all of it, and it comes with some strings -- an expensive bill, typically crappy customer service, and people hate their cable company. While the DVR has made substantial inroads, it remains somewhat complicated.

Our view is different. Our view is that everything you ever want to watch is available in the cloud, and the question is getting it to you easily, quickly, which is what we focus on.

Contentinople: With set-top boxes, gaming consoles, and optical disc players out there, why would someone want another stand-alone box on their TV?

Tim Twerdahl: It's a hell of a lot easier to find and watch a movie through a dedicated device like ours than it is through a gaming console or to manage the menu of your DVD player. There's a lot to be said for user experience.

I used to worry about being on Input 2 or Input 3 [on a TV]. But we haven't seen that be an issue for customers. They're more than willing to flip over to the box that gives them the right experience.

Contentinople: Where do most of your customers get their high-speed Internet connections from today?

Tim Twerdahl: It's a mix of cable and DSL. When you separate the cable company into video versus ISP, we are a great partner for the ISP side. We drive adoption of broadband. On the video side, clearly we're a competitor, and they're trying to figure out how to handle that. And I think they're realizing that they need to be very consumer friendly about it.

Contentinople: Most of the broadband-connected devices that we've seen have similar content -- Netflix, Amazon, YouTube Inc. , etc. How can you differentiate your product from devices like the Xbox 360 or TiVo or some of these Internet connected Blu-ray players?

Tim Twerdahl: It's three things for us. One is value -- $99 is extremely hard to beat, especially in this economy. Another is it's really easy to use our product. And the third is content. Yes, there is overlap today. We will be bringing out additional channels that you will not see on those types of boxes. They're big-name entertainment companies.

Contentinople: Can you tell me more about the content providers you're talking to -- like MTV Networks or Comedy Central or Hulu?

Tim Twerdahl: I can't obviously talk about any of those specific deals. But I'll tell you philosophically where we're going.

We look at content for our boxes as this matrix: You have various kinds of content -- TV shows, movies, YouTube. One of the key cells that we don't have today in that matrix is ad-supported TV. We will have ad-supported TV this year.

User-generated clips that are free or ad supported is something we're focused on. Subscription-based music and free music are things we're looking at.

Rounding out that content matrix is what we're focused on now. This summer, we'll be releasing an SDK [software development kit] publicly where anybody can create a channel, and we will have a marketplace for those channels so that our users can choose to add the channels they'd like to to the box.

We strongly believe that we don't have a monopoly on every great idea for what would make sense to put on the TV, and so this SDK will really let the community help define that for us.

Contentinople: What kind of impact does Hulu's agreement with Disney have on Roku?

Tim Twerdahl: We think it's great. Hulu is an amazing service. It's had huge success. And it proves the demand for exactly what we're talking about -- which is TV on my own time without having to worry about DVRs and cable service and all that kind of thing.

The problem -- the Achilles' heel of that service -- is they can't bring it to the TV right now. You've seen the Boxee controversy. In many ways, it sets us up. We are well positioned to be the Hulu of TV.

Contentinople: Would you like to offer Hulu through Roku?

Tim Twerdahl: However we get it, what we want to offer is the content. We want to offer the shows that NBC Universal and ABC Inc. and Fox Broadcasting Co. and CBS Corp. (NYSE: CBS) and all of those other companies have access to. If Hulu wants to talk to us about doing that, that would be great, but it's not the only path for us to get that content.