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Roku founder, chairman and CEO Anthony Wood has some big predictions about the pending impact of generative AI on Hollywood — including that the first 100% AI-generated “hit movie” will debut within the next three years.
“I have no idea if there’s an investment bubble, but I know that AI is going to be huge, and it already is,” Wood said during a headliner conversation with Variety‘s co-editor-in-chief Cynthia Littleton at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES Wednesday. “So it’s going to affect lots of different industries, but in our industry, it’s going to lower the cost of content production. I predict within the next three years, we’ll see the first 100% AI-generated hit movie, for example.”
Wood founded Roku in 2008 and has since grown the tech company into the world’s largest streaming platform, with more than 50% of broadband households using its service. According to Wood, Roku processes 40% of all streaming flows in the U.S., Canada, Mexico, Latin America and the U.K.
With a business that big on the line, Wood is embracing AI’s potential for streamlining streaming.
“The way I think about it is in three buckets,” Wood said during Variety‘s CES summit at the Aria in Las Vegas. “One is just business operations. How do we just make our business more efficient by adopting AI? We do that aggressively. I think companies that don’t do that are going to be at a serious competitive disadvantage; their operating expenses will be higher than other competitors. So we’re very focused on just being more efficient. Second is we use AI throughout our product: targeted ads, recommendations, these are all AI based technologies. That’s traditionally machine-learning-based AI, but we’re moving all that to generative AI. It’s like the next generation.”
Outside of the positive potential for business operations, Wood concurs with a widely held industry opinion: The biggest way generative AI will impact the media industry is by lowering the cost of content creation.
“I think people underestimate how dramatic that’s going to be,” Wood said. “I mean, obviously I don’t think people are going to get replaced. Humans are still the creative force behind creating content and hit shows, but the cost is going to come down dramatically, and that’s going to change a lot of companies’ business models. So I’m focused on, how do we take advantage of that? That’s a big opportunity for us.”
Currently, Roku’s primary focus is its platform business, which includes advertising and subscriptions, which Wood says generated more than $4 billion in revenue in 2025. However, it recently acquired two new businesses that expand its portfolio and money-making potential: low-cost, ad-free streamer Howdy (which includes a wide library of content rather than Roku originals) and bundled channel service Frndly TV.
For Howdy, Wood describes the $3-per-month Howdy offering as “not designed to replace a major streaming service like Netflix or Disney, it’s designed to be an add-on service.”
“The opportunity for Howdy was, if you just look at what’s going on in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more and more expensive,” Wood said. “They keep raising prices, and they keep adding larger and larger ad loads. So the part of the market where it actually started, low cost and no ads, is gone now. There’s no streaming services that addressed that portion of the market. That’s the opportunity for Howdy. It’s three bucks a month and no ads and it’s doing extremely well. Just like we built the Roku Channel using the promotional power of our platform, that’s what we’re doing with Howdy. We’re using that to grow it. But Howdy has very broad appeal. There’s lots of people in the world that want a $3-a-month streaming service with no ads. So we’ll start on Roku, but we’ll also take it off platform as well. I think it’s going to be a really large business.”
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