Roku has agreed to buy demand-side platform dataxu for USD 150 million in cash and stock.
Roku, which has approximately 30.5 million active accounts, is now better able to compete with the other big OTT platforms, such as Amazon Fire TV, which (als0 has its own DSP. Amazon claims more than 34 million Amazon Fire TV users and back in June, Amazon Fire TV began allowing video publishers to sell advertising through third-party demand-side platforms (DSPs) dataxu and The Trade Desk as well as selling advertising through Amazon’s own DSP.
Boston-based dataxu provides marketers with an automated bidding, self-serve platform for managing advertising campaigns programmatically across digital platforms.
Roku Founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer Anthony Wood setup the business in 2002 and has been its CEO since then. In 2007, Anthony also briefly served as Vice President of Internet TV at Netflix. Prior to Roku, Anthony invented the DVR (digital video recorder) and founded ReplayTV, where he served as CEO before the company’s acquisition in 2001. Before ReplayTV, Anthony co-founded iband.com, an Internet software company later acquired by Macromedia. Anthony is also Founder and Chairman of BrightSign LLC [1], the global market leader in digital signage products that was spun off from Roku in 2010.