Netflix Spinoff Roku Seeks Cash for 100-Channel Set-Top Service

Bloomberg

Roku Inc., the television set-top box maker spun off by Netflix Inc., is planning to raise $30 million in private funding this quarter and may sell shares to the public next year, Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood said.

The company, which lets customers stream movies from Netflix and Amazon.com Inc. on their TVs, along with music from Pandora Media Inc., has sold more than 500,000 of its devices, Wood said yesterday in an interview in San Francisco. Revenue may almost double to about $75 million this year, he said.

The funds would help Roku expand its engineering and marketing as competition mounts. Sony Corp., Nintendo Co. and Microsoft Corp. stream Netflix and other services on game consoles, and Samsung Electronics Co. does so through Blu-ray DVD players. To win customers, Wood plans to continue cutting the price of his devices, which sold for $115 in May 2008 and now go for as little as $80.

“It gets cheaper and cheaper, and the box will be free at some point in the not-too-distant future,” said Wood, 44, whose ReplayTV was an early seller of digital-video recorders. “We see hardware margins becoming less important over time and subscription content becoming more important.”

Roku’s fund-raising this quarter will include investments from Menlo Ventures and others, Wood said. He declined to provide the company’s market value. Saratoga, California-based Roku isn’t working with an investment bank and doesn’t have a specific IPO date, he said.

“Obviously our goal is to go public,” Wood said. “If things continue on this trajectory, I think it would be viable to go public next year.”

Netflix Sells Stake

Netflix hired Wood in 2007 to help the movie-rental company move from a mail-order to online service. Netflix planned to release its own box until Chief Executive Officer Reed Hastings decided to stay out of the hardware business. Wood created a separate company, and Netflix backed it with $6 million.

Netflix recently sold its stake to Menlo Ventures, Wood said. Steve Swasey, a spokesman for Los Gatos, California-based Netflix, confirmed the sale and said the company may discuss it with fourth-quarter results today. Roku has raised $24 million from Wood, Netflix and Menlo.

Wood is focused on signing partners to offer viewers more choices and expects to reach 1 million boxes sold this year. In November, the company introduced the Roku Channel Store, which includes the Pandora music service and photos from Facebook Inc. Roku also offers Revision3 and Blip.tv, which stream original shows on the Internet.

Roku is recruiting third parties to create channels and offer products including games and submit them for inclusion on the service. The company is devising revenue-sharing agreements for developers who can sell subscriptions on the service or charge per product like Amazon.com.

Revenue Sharing

The terms will be comparable to other media products, Wood said. Developers for Apple Inc.’s iPhone get 70 percent of sales, with the rest going to Apple.

The plan is to have 100 channels this year, Wood said. That will let Roku generate sales from subscriptions and advertisements, much like cable TV channels.

“We’re not far away from the time when you’ll be able to get the same kinds of channels that any cable operator can offer,” he said.

Nielsen to Measure Effectiveness of Advertising on Xbox Live

Interactive TV Today

Pilot Test Part of Longer-Term Microsoft-Nielsen Collaboration to Measure Xbox Advertising

In a posting on a corporate blog last week, Microsoft's general manager of marketing and advertising strategy, Mark Kroese, announced that the company is teaming with the Nielsen Company on a pilot test to measure the effectiveness of in-game advertising. The test is launching with the second season of "1 vs. 100 Live," the avatar-driven interactive TV version of the Endemol-developed "1 vs. 100" game show format, that Microsoft offers on its Xbox Live service.

Like a regular linear-TV game show, "1 vs. 100 Live" has real hosts--albeit represented via avatars--airs in regularly scheduled timeslots, has seasons, includes commercial breaks, and allows participants to win prizes, including Microsoft Points, which can be redeemed for Xbox Live content downloads.

The "1 vs. 100" format features a single contestant--the "one"--competing against 100 other contestants--the "mob"--to correctly answer multiple-choice trivia questions: each question is first posed to the "mob" outside of the "one's" hearing, so that they can lock in their answers, and is then posed to the "one." If the "one" answers the question correctly, all the members of the "mob" who answered it incorrectly are eliminated. In the Xbox Live version of the format, the "one" wins Microsoft Points for each correct answer and, if he or she succeeds in eliminating all the members of the mob, he or she can win up to 10,000 Microsoft Points.

Individual members of the "mob," meanwhile, can win prizes, including Microsoft Points and Xbox Live arcade games, for answering questions correctly, outlasting the majority of their fellow "mob" members, and outlasting the "one." Xbox Live subscribers who want to participate in one of the show's live episodes are selected to play as the "one," as members of the "mob," or as mere audience members, based on how frequently and how well they play the live and practice versions of the show.

"The Xbox Live advertising group has teamed up with the Nielsen Company to launch a pilot test, beginning with Season 2 of "1 vs. 100," to obtain content, channel and ad-specific metrics and identify who was playing the game and saw a particular advertisement," Kroese wrote. "This is the first time content delivered through a video game console network will be capable of being measured by Nielsen's television, online and video game metering technologies, such as the Nielsen people meter. Our goal is to ultimately provide advertisers with concrete Gross Rating Points (GRP's) and Targeted Rating Points (TRP's) to maximize their media spend. I'm really looking forward to this effort--it's a huge milestone in the evolution of games and entertainment advertising and a great benefit for our advertisers. We've made a substantial investment of time and resources to launch this pilot. Yet, as we bring Xbox Live into the TV advertising ecosystem, we feel that it is imperative to bring valid measurement capabilities along with it. This is a critical first step in doing that."

Kroese also stated that, after the pilot test concludes (note: the second season of "1 vs. 100 Live" premiered November 19th and is scheduled to last 14 weeks), Microsoft will "continue to collaborate with Nielsen to learn how electronic measurement, panels and census data can be applied to additional Xbox Live media types such as TV, video, [and] social media."