Hi there! My name is Janko Roettgers, and this is Lowpass. This week: How Roku’s sale to Fox unfolded, and Amazon’s latest streaming adapter update.

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Roku CEO Anthony Wood wanted out.

More than 20 years after founding Roku, and eight years after taking the company public, Wood told Roku’s board of directors in September of 2025 that he was ready to step back, and let someone else be in charge.

To facilitate an orderly transition, Wood had come up with a plan: The board would appoint a co-CEO of his choosing. Then, after a while, he’d transition out of the CEO role completely and become Roku’s executive chairman, only to eventually give up that post as well.

Sounds familiar? That’s no accident. It’s the exact playbook Netflix used for its CEO succession, with longtime CEO Reed Hastings initially sharing the lead with Ted Sarandos, only to eventually hand over the reins completely when former CPO Greg Peters succeeded him as co-CEO in early 2023.

It made sense for Wood to model Roku’s succession plan after Netflix. Not only was Roku’s streaming devices business incubated at Netflix, Roku also frequently took other cues from the streaming giant, whether it was about operating its business out of Los Gatos or having executives pen a letter to shareholders every quarter. “Anthony always had an incredible amount of respect for the Netflix model,” says a former senior employee.

But here’s the thing: Roku is not Netflix. “This has always very much been [Wood’s] baby,” says a second former senior employee. As founding CEO, Wood has been intimately involved in many of its product and business decisions throughout the years. Especially when it came to questions of hardware and user experience, employees routinely had to run even minor tweaks by Wood, according to a third former senior employee. 

“He had the final sign-off,” that employee says. “He decided everything.”

Some of this even played out in public. When Roku launched a new home screen earlier this year, Wood told the audience of the Morgan Stanley Conference that this wasn’t a matter he was willing to delegate. “It's a project I'm involved in directly,” Wood said. “The home screen is so important that I spend a lot of time [on it].” In the same conversation, Wood also revealed that the person in charge of subscriptions, which are increasingly important to Roku’s business, reports directly to him.

Does that sound like someone ready to share the reins? A fourth former senior Roku employee, who was with the company during its early days, doesn’t think so. “I think he'd bail or stay put,” this former employee tells me. “There's really no in-between. He's too stubborn to share a leadership role.”