| There's always been money in streaming when you're doing it with pipelines, ships, and barges. Sure it takes decades but this was a startup financed by a small family loan, rather than true venture capital that could more realistically be considered "Other People's Money". So they get to be private, start their exponential growth from a much more retarded point, and have to leverage other people's pipelines, ships, and barges or it wouldn't work. Even in a capitalist market, enough strength can sometimes be built without other people's money, that it can be an unfair advantage compared to the capital-bound operators making up the majority of the market itself. Entrepreneurialism != Capitalism. With Roku I heard of it here and it turns out I had a pretty good idea about their streaming. But no further interest other than to see how they do financially over the years, as a spectator. I'm hardly a consumer at all. So definitely didn't find out about Roku as a consumer. But before I knew it my brother got one, he consumes that stuff and now I'm more familiar than I wanted to be. I would actually call it kind of boring myself. |