Roku looks to be seriously tightening its pursestrings. The company’s laying off a full ten percent of its workforce, over 300 employees, in addition to a conducting a number of other cost-cutting measures, as reported by Variety. These job cuts are just the beginning, as Roku’s also removing streaming content, consolidating office space and reducing outside service expenses. The goal here is a major reduction in the year-over-year operating expense growth rate.
I know an even better way for them to save money. Anthony Wood, the CEO, gets like $20,990,000 in total yearly compensation. Like most these fucks most of it is non-salary, so they don’t pay taxes on it right away if at all.
I fell down the internet rabbit hole. He gets 1.2M in pay. No bonus and no stock award. The rest are options. Last year he has sold 400,000 shares worth $69M. The year before he sold 1,950,000 shares worth $690M… Looks like he had a scheduled sale of 80,000 shares every 2 weeks. Which had been worth about $25M every time. It looks like he stopped it when the same sale started pulling in about $11M. So yeah, assuming a generous $500k fully loaded employee cost, they cut $150M in HC. So canning him would save about 40 jobs. And he’d still be a billionaire.
I think you touch on the real issue, and it’s where the wealth of a company is created. The cashflow and operations is one thing, the investor money is entirely another. People in the company don’t benefit from the investor capital nearly as much as the senior leadership does. The takeaway is how fundamentally broken the economy is right now as investment is wrecking how we do business. “Publicly traded” my ass. I get that companies need capital, and the VC money is one thing, but when we see shit like this it paints the picture of an established company getting enshittified to satisfy late game investors that act more like a parasite than anything else, and undermines the prosperity of business itself.
It’s not late game investors, but short term investors.
I mean I guess it’s both, but short term investors don’t give a fuck about the fundamentals of a company, they care about growth, or at least the illusion of growth above all else.
So you end up with gigantic conglomerates that do everything. Piano makers that sell dirt bikes, movie companies that run theme parks, kettle makers that run the largest financial institutions in the world. It makes no logical sense, but that doesn’t matter…. Line goes up.
Piano makers that sell dirt bikes, movie companies that run theme parks, kettle makers that run the largest financial institutions in the world
I know that’s Yamaha and Disney, but I’m blanking on the last one. I probably know it but don’t know about the kettle side.
You haven’t heard of JP Morgan Chase kettles?
General electric
Absolutely. Roku probably would be doing fine if they stuck with the cute little TV boxes and didn’t have to keep making growth targets for the parasites. That drive for constant growth has made their core product suck more too…
Having used Roku stuff recently, and helping family out with their new shiny Roku tv’s, I couldn’t agree more. You took the words right from me. They enshittified bigtime since the days people genuinely loved using their products.
Roku tv interfaces are still better than vizio and even samsungs slower advertising interfaces.
Like those slimy venture capital groups that take over declining businesses and instead of getting them back on their feet take out tons of loans against them, pocket the cash, then sell off the parts that still work and throw the rest (and the employees) away?
In capitalism businesses have only one purpose. “To last long” ain’t it. The biggest owners and their chief lieutenants must make as much money as is humanly possible. Sometimes that means a long term strategy, and sometimes it doesn’t.
But we can’t have that I guess. I fucking hate corporations so much.
You hear this a lot when personal wealth is discussed, “But his wealth isn’t real, it is in the business!” This shows that the wealth is real.
It amuses me when a company will go on about how they need to let people go and cut costs but then they piss away millions on a handful of people. The real issue is that they need to cut costs to keep pissing away money on a few people.
If you slice his compensation in half, that’s about 100 employees he can pay at $100k for a full year.
So employees cost more than just their salaries (if they get things like benefits, 401K match, etc.) So you’d have to cut more than half of his total compensation, which I don’t think either of us would be mad about
I also doubt most of those employees made 100k either so it’s probably still a good estimate.
Wow. That is insane. You better be god’s gift to business brilliance to justify that.
Torrents of The Weird Al movie are about to become quite popular.
Which is funny because he originally encouraged people in countries without Roku to do so.
They took a gamble and tried to play the streaming game - and lost
Did any of y’all Roku owners buy their device for the purpose of their streaming content? I know I didn’t - I bought it because of the promise of an excellent UI to organize all of my other already-existing-and-too-many services in an easy streamlined interface even my dad could use.
removes streaming content
What else do they do/have?
I bought a Roku TV when I moved. Used it a few weeks and then realized the level of horrific tracking my pi-hole server was blocking from it. (thanks PiHole) I reset it to factory and no longer allowed it on the network. Now it’s an acceptable TV with a completely dogshit useless remote.
Sort of related- is it even possible to buy a “dumb” TV anymore or are we stuck paying 8x as much for “digital signage” panels now?
Spectre makes a dumb 4K TV. It’s a good panel that doesn’t track usage.
I shouldn’t be this excited about the link, but double-checked the specs on their official site and it’s not even equipped with ethernet/wifi- the world is so shitty these days that I almost squealed like a little girl. Thanks for sharing that.
Why would it need ethernet/wifi if its a dumb tv?
It wouldn’t. That’s the feature I wanted to NOT see on it :D
It’s a just ok panel. Tends to look really washed out.
Dude SAME HERE. When I first setup my pihole I’m like “JESUS CHRIST WHY ARE MY 2 ROKUS MAKE UP over 80% OF REQUESTS!?”
That day I gave them away and moved to Apple TVs. Shit has been so so much better ever since
My only real issue with Roku is the lack of a decent Ethernet port on them. 100mbit ports are too slow for 2023
It does feel like antiquated tech but what streaming service uses even 50+mbps streaming? The services I know of (apple, Netflix, Disney) all max out around 30mbps.
Self hosted (jellyfin, Plex) can use more.
But could the decoder keep up? Decoders come in a variety of sizes and I doubt they’d pay the extra cost to put a 120Mbps decoder in the device when no streaming services require it.
100mbps is too slow for 2023
It’s appropriate for the device’s functionality. 4K HDR is at most 40Mbps. If the device supported large local storage and offline playback, you’d have a point. But given the device’s use case as a streaming client, I doubt you’d be able to find any workload that gets close to saturating the network. Even if you could find a content source that was higher than 100Mbps, it’s unlikely the decoder would be able to keep up.
Bluray rips can be 80mbps+ but I’ve never had trouble streaming them on any device including roku. Important to remember that the bitrate is an average so some scenes will be well above the advertised bitrate.
bitrate is an average
Yes but that’s why the network and decoder are buffered. It’s also why most content is constrained at encode time to target both an average bitrate and a peak bitrate. A 200% constraint is typical, so you shouldn’t find 4K HDR in the wild at over 80Mbps peak bitrate.
The buffers on streaming devices are much smaller on these devices because of how cost reduced they are. You’re way overselling how large they are.
Also, 80mbps is actually a pretty common avg bitrate on 4kuhd blurays. You have 100gb of disk to play with and they generally want to use it as much as possible.
I have a Roku TV.
I liked it at first because it’s just a vehicle for using Netflix, Hulu, or streaming from a HDMI.
But in the past 6 months, more and more ads keep showing. Things I’m refusing to interact with. Tried blocking and then they circumvented that.
Not only that, but now all apps have to have remove any Screensaver that kept the screen active on that app. For instance, Plex now doesn’t have a Screensaver so if you are listening to music and pause it too long, you lose all progress on that Playlist and it starts all over again. Big bummer that is making me question getting a new Roku later this year.
When it comes to Plex and Roku, I’d like them to work out whatever issue it is that makes it a toss-up whether or not movie subtitles will show up. They work fine on any other device I watch through.
I got around that by hardcoding foreign subs into mp4’s.
I take this as a good sign that the data tracking market is growing stale. Like what value can tracking my viewing habits provide anyone, other than Roku, that the streaming platforms aren’t already doing on their own? It’s straight double dipping.
Looks like it’s time for me to sell my Roku stock that I bought during the pandemic when their price was constantly going up.
To be fair, it’s pretty telling that I have a TV with built in Roku, but I only use it to access my Apple TV which is faster and smoother.
They where only popular bc the other options where also crappy or very expensive. Also I highly doubt anyone bought a roku tv bc it was roku, it’s more like they didnt have a choice.
I definitely did. It’s the best of the interfaces I’ve worked with. Samsung and LG both have abysmal built in OS’s and I do want an internet connected TV.
They’re privacy nightmares, but they work a whole lot better than the competition.
Fully agreed. It’s the best of a bad situation, and their apps do run reasonably well compared to the absolute shitshow that is Samsung.
I love the Roku remote and interface. But I have a Google TV and even though I’m sure it’s sending my viewing habits to Google it’s also basically and Android device so you can do many more things with it than a Roku. You can’t install anything on a Roku that Roku doesn’t specifically authorize.
shit i have to finish outer limits before they remove it
Yar matey! Sailin’ the Seas always be an option for ye!
