| When Cody Heller found out Roku was buying her show "Dummy," she was thrilled. The TV writer had made the series with the actress Anna Kendrick for Quibi, only to see the app shut down less than eight months after its debut. Now Roku was going to give it another shot at finding an audience. "It will be available again, and I want people to see it," she told me Friday. But she still has a lot of questions, including: Who uses Roku? Does Roku make original series? When are they planning to premiere Quibi shows on Roku? Heller isn't the only person asking these questions. Roku is best known as the company that makes those devices you plug into your TV to watch Netflix and Amazon Prime Video. But when Roku announced earlier this year that it was buying dozens of shows that had been made for Quibi, the company suddenly got into business with some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Kendrick, Kevin Hart and Sam Raimi. That deal was the start of what appears to be Roku's "Netflix moment," that exciting time in the life of a technology company when it decides to play in Hollywood. After acquiring Quibi's catalog, Roku acquired "This Old House," a U.S. home improvement series with a library of some 1,500 shows. And then it brought in some branded content experts from the comedians at Funny or Die. Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, Tumblr, YouTube, Snap, Facebook and TikTok have all comes to this same existential fork in the road. People use your products to watch videos, so why not produce them yourself? For the past 10 to 15 years, Roku has offered other companies' streaming services on its set-top boxes and smart TVs. Despite competition from Google, Apple and Amazon, it remains the market leader. Yet while Roku is best known for making devices, it now makes most of its money selling advertising. It sells ads for hundreds of video services, and splits the revenue with them. Last year, Roku's "platform business," which is mostly advertising, topped $1 billion for the first time. Roku also owns one of the fastest-growing channels in this space: the Roku Channel is like a mini cable bundle with live feeds of reruns and old movies. It relies on shows from other providers. Advertising is the reason Roku's market capitalization has soared from a couple billion dollars when it went public in 2017 to about $40 billion today. So what do you do when you have something that's working? You double down. By owning shows, Roku keeps all of the advertising sales and can also experiment with different formats to see what works. Experiment is the operative word. These deals are best viewed as a test, according to Rob Holmes, the company's vice president of programming. "There is very much an opportunity for us to understand what works and then continue to invest behind it," he said this past week. Roku hasn't committed billions of dollars to original programming, a la Amazon or Apple. It acquired a bunch of shows from a distressed company at a fire-sale price, and acquired a tiny media company that fit its needs almost perfectly. Roku is going to test whether the glitzy Quibi shows draw more eyeballs to its namesake channel. The result could lead to a more significant investment in Hollywood or a decision to stick with home-improvement shows that speak to its middle class viewers. It's going to see if controlling shows boosts ad sales enough to justify the expense of funding them. One thing Hollywood producers shouldn't expect from Roku, at least not right away, is huge checks. The company doesn't want to sink a bunch of money into shows that it might not get back – what's called deficit financing. Nor can it afford to. Roku is being opportunistic, in the words of Holmes. "We don't need a 'Stranger Things' every week for 52 weeks," he said. Roku will continue to invest if it works, and will stop if it doesn't. Given that its entire business is predicated on distributing other people's apps, it's hard to see the company reorienting around original content (a la Netflix). Distributors like AT&T, Comcast and Apple, among others) always put the pipes ahead of the productions. But all those companies have still decided owning content benefits their bottom line. Roku's experiment comes with of risks. The company already has a contentious relationship with many larger media companies because it asks for a cut of advertising and subscription sales. HBO Max launched without even being available on Roku devices. Now Roku is competing more directly for viewers and projects. The company also has to convince Hollywood that the Roku Channel isn't Siberia. Some of the A-listers involved in Quibi shows weren't exactly thrilled about the sale to Roku, which is the antithesis of Quibi. Roku is a hardware company run by an engineer best-known for wearing suspenders, while Quibi was a glitzy Hollywood startup led by two very famous executives. I would wager that neither Liam Hemsworth nor Anna Kendrick has ever watched the Roku Channel. But Roku has hired many of Quibi's former executives to help oversee the shows, and massage egos. Most of the people involved in these shows are just happy audiences might actually see them this time. "I was really sad because this thing I was proud of was only out in the world for such a short amount of time," said Heller, who also co-created "Deadbeat," one of Hulu's first original series. "Roku is in like 50 million homes. That's great." – Lucas Shaw The best of Screentime (and other stuff) | 
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