First-order effects

• IPO investors now have to value Roku on its ad and channel-transaction business rather than raw usage, since the most-watched services on the device pay little or nothing for their placement.
• Netflix and YouTube get free reach onto millions of TV screens through Roku, while Roku bears the hardware cost of delivering their traffic.

Second-order effects

• Roku is pushed toward advertising and content-discovery surfaces it controls — home-screen placements and its own channels — because third-party app usage alone doesn't convert to revenue.
• Smaller streaming services that do pay Roku for promotion and subscriptions become disproportionately important to the P&L, giving Roku leverage over exactly the mid-tier services trying to compete with Netflix and YouTube.

Third-order effects

• If the pattern holds, TV operating systems consolidate into advertising platforms where usage share and revenue share diverge — the OS owner monetizes attention around the apps, not the apps themselves, which is the model Wood was already describing when discussing licensing Roku's tech to TV makers.
• The structure points toward platform owners like Roku capturing the ad layer of streaming TV, a shift the company itself leaned into in later years as ads became central to its Roku strategy.