Keen On… Anthony Wood: The Inventor of Personal Video Recorder on the Future of TV (TCTV)
February 23, 2011 at 14:33 PM EST
Meet the man who killed the television industry. In the mid Nineties, while he was looking at a Fry’s ad, Anthony Wood invented the personal video recorder (PVR). From this epiphany, Wood founded ReplayTV in 1997, a PVR company which, for a short while, gave TiVO a run for its money. But Wood not only invented the PVR, he also helped kill it. In 2002, after leaving ReplayTV, Wood founded Roku, a self-styled “cable killer” hardware company which provides a box for accessing on-demand video. Almost ten years after founding Roku, Wood really is starting to scare the traditional cable industry. He’s already sold a million Roku boxes and streamed a billion minutes of content from Roku devices. And this year, Wood expects to sell a million and a half boxes, thus making Roku, Wood says, the 10th largest cable company in the US. Video ahead.