Apple has hired Timothy D. Twerdahl, director of Amazon's Fire TV business, as VP of Apple TV product marketing; Twerdahl worked at Netflix and Roku in the past
Former Amazon executive also held roles at Netflix and Roku — The hire lets company to beef up team seeking content deals
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple's VP-level hire of Timothy D. Twerdahl — who ran Amazon's Fire TV business after stints at Netflix and Roku — lands four months before the company's bigger swing into original video, the recruitment of Sony TV executives Jamie Erlicht and Zack Amburg to lead worldwide programming under Eddy Cue. Taken together, the two moves mark early 2017 as the moment Apple stopped treating TV as a hobby device category and started staffing it like a media business.
The hire also slots into a running exchange of executives between the four companies now fighting for the living room: Apple has since pulled a top Netflix engineer onto its TV+ technical team (staffing up TV+) and a Hulu/Quibi veteran for bundling work, while Roku answered in kind by hiring away Apple's Siri chief architect Brian Pinkerton.
First-order effects
- Amazon loses the director of its Fire TV business to its most direct living-room hardware rival, while Apple gains a product-marketing VP whose resume spans all three competing platforms — Fire TV, Netflix, and Roku — precisely as the description says the role exists to beef up the team pursuing content deals.
Second-order effects
- Roku, Twerdahl's former employer, now competes against an Apple TV operation run partly by someone who knows its positioning from the inside — and the talent flow runs both ways, as Roku's later capture of Siri chief architect Brian Pinkerton shows each side raiding the other's bench rather than hiring from outside the cluster.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, the streaming-hardware and subscription-video market consolidates around a small circulating pool of executives moving among Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Roku — with Apple's later push to build an ad business around TV+ under Lauren Fry suggesting these hires compound toward advertising, not just subscriptions, as the end state.
The trend: The battle for connected-TV dominance is being fought as much through executive raids among Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and Roku as through products, with each hire hardening the platforms' convergence on original content and advertising.