In First NewFronts Pitch Since His Jump From Fox, Roku Media President Charlie Collier Welcomes Brands To The Stream
deadline.comCharlie Collier, who segued last fall from lengthy exec stints at Fox Corp. and AMC Networks to a top post at Roku, took the stage at his first NewFronts pitch Tuesday to invite advertisers to bring their messages to the stream. “Roku is not fighting for turf in the streaming wars,” he told the crowd at Chelsea Factory in New York. “Roku is the turf.
The streaming wars are not happening to Roku. We’re not in the streaming wars. The streaming wars are playing out on our platform.” After a brief introduction by “Weird” Al Yankovic, whose life and music served as the backdrop of Roku’s 2022 original movie Weird, Collier began by paying homage to Roku’s origins.
Founder and CEO Anthony Wood, he said, is the inventor or the DVR and then devised of a piece of hardware capable of delivering video images via the internet because he wanted to find a way to watch episodes of Star Trek. (Collier skipped the part about Wood working for Netflix and getting its co-founder Reed Hastings’ blessing to use the device he had created as the basis of a new start-up.
Netflix, he explained, didn’t want to be in the hardware business.) Fast-forwarding to 2023, Collier said he and his team had debated whether or not to shift Roku’s presentation from the NewFronts to the traditional broadcast upfront week (which starts May 15 this year).
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