Inside Netflix's Project Griffin: The Forgotten History Of Roku Under Reed Hastings

The inside history of the Netflix Player, a black and boxy device, which subscribers would hook up to their televisions to stream movies and TV shows from the web. They codenamed the top-secret project "Griffin," after Tim Robbins' character from the film "The Player." After all, that's what the team was building: The Netflix Player, a black and boxy device, as plain and compact as a necklace case, which subscribers would hook up to their televisions to stream movies and TV shows from the web. Netflix executives knew it could fundamentally change how the company delivered content to its customers, who were used to waiting days for DVDs to arrive by mail. Soon, Netflix could leverage the digital content deals it was striking with studios to dominate the living room, a war still waging today between industry giants like Apple, Google, and Microsoft. It was December 2007, and the devi...