Phil Rosenberg

Some of the best partnerships start with friction. For years, Dolby Laboratories and Google saw the tech landscape through different lenses. Google has been a champion of open source. Dolby, too, believes in openness—supporting industry standards and enabling innovation across a wide ecosystem—but we’ve traditionally focused on delivering end-to-end quality through tightly integrated experiences. But something shifted when leaders on both sides started asking a different question: Not “Where do we differ?” but “What do we share?” And it turned out, we have quite a bit in common. We both serve creators. We both serve consumers. We both want developers to build extraordinary experiences in sound, video, and storytelling. And these experiences are to be available across the cross-section of devices and endpoints. By focusing on those shared goals instead of our differing approaches, we built a partnership rooted in a specific purpose - not just “being aligned.” Now, we’re seeing the results in the form of the first-ever Google product to ship with Dolby technology built in at the OS level. It’s a big win for us, our partners, and consumers alike, and I think it’s a lesson the tech world could take to heart: In a complex, interconnected ecosystem, the most valuable partnerships aren’t always the most obvious. But if you start with the consumer, stay open, be curious, and build from common ground, you’ll often find more alignment than you expect.

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CES 2026 recap and one big prediction Everyone’s all blah blah AI blah AI AI AI blah blah But humans still run into the hard realities of making things work. Anyone who’s built, anything, knows that things break. Things break all the time. After seeing a presentation on all the new technologies coming out…and AI…this QR code breaking reminded me how humans in the loop are still THE core requirement to making anything work. This is true with AI as well. It’s not some magical fix, it needs to be utilized by people to save time…not replace them. So many small problems require humans to do the last mile work to ACTUALLY deliver a desired result. Founders, operators, managers, directors, and C-suite, … The people that don’t just have ideas - the ones who ACTUALLY do the work - this one prediction is for you. You need to remember and most likely you will need to remind everyone around you that at the end of the day someone needs to be responsible for things working in the organization. Including any operation or report or task given to AI. Or else things break. And when they break, who’s responsible? Who’s checking the automation? How? What’s the process? AI replacing people forces more work on the people who ACTUALLY deliver substantial value. The people who’s time is the most valuable and often undervalued because the just get shit done. You know who you are. AI forces more problems onto you. More, onto people higher up in the org, which burns them out faster, and doesn’t keep value in the organization. The result is value actually leaves your company which is more significant than the deminimus cost savings (DOGE and the false promises / real problems are Unfort. an evergreen case study on this for years to come). That value - people’s time - is lost. At the end of the day - it’s HOW people use AI, and finding ways to save time that matters. “AI” is a sham if someone can’t explain the exact type of tech (LLM, reinforced learning, generative task automation etc.) and AI can help do more work, but it should be viewed as a tool to help people do more - ESPECIALLY junior employees who can help drive transformation in doing the difficult and painful work that can’t be automated. Training employees to leverage AI will enable companies to grow faster. BUT, any leader, team, or company who primarily takes a cost savings POV with AI will end up losing to their competitors. Those companies will see their best people burn out, become unsatisfied, and leave faster. If someone doesn’t believe you - share this post with them because chances are you’re one of the people who just gets shit done and other people don’t always understand how or even need to ask. Companies focused on cost savings with AI alone will grow slower than competitors, and by the time they realize their mistake, it may be too late for the to course correct to use new innovations to drive growth (IDE, agentic solutions, spec driven design…)

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Amazon just took a huge step toward owning your living room. And independent DSPs are cooked! Let me explain what happened ... The Fire TV maker is teaming up with Roku—the #1 CTV platform in the U.S.—to launch a massive joint ad network. Together, they now control access to 80% of connected TV households in the U.S. Amazon’s DSP will power ad placement across both Fire TV and Roku Channel. 💡Why does this matter? Because it’s not Netflix vs. Disney anymore. Arguably it never was. It’s Fire TV vs. Roku vs. Samsung vs. Google TV. Silicon Valley vs. Asian OEMs. This is a hardware + OS war for the TV home screen - and Amazon just moved into a commanding position. If Amazon ends up acquiring Roku (as many now predict for 2026), it won’t just be the biggest CTV deal of the decade. It would be the final blow to independent DSPs like The Trade Desk. I still don't get it!? Because whoever owns the OS, owns the pipes. No OS access = no data, no placement, no power. The Trade Desk has spent years building algorithms to optimize CTV buys. But if Roku and Fire TV stop giving them inventory or data, or price it up, it’s game over. And building a competing OS? Too late. Amazon just blocked the last open lane. CTV ad spend is expected to hit $30B in the U.S. Owning the operating system means owning: ✅ Ad inventory ✅ Audience data ✅ Content discovery ✅ The future of streaming itself. Shout-out to Anna K. for all the killer adtech insights on our flight form Cannes Lions to Vienna. (Anna, I ultimately missed my connection and had to overnight - Tafelspitz at Plachutta made it worth it 😅) 💬 What’s your take: Is Amazon about to buy Roku? And what does that mean for the rest of the CTV stack? #CTV #Amazon #Roku #AdTech

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I’m back with Nielsen ’s April 2025 The Gauge report, and streaming just hit another record. Total TV usage stayed flat compared to March, but streaming? Still climbing, reaching a new all-time high of 44.3% of total TV viewing. And leading the charge? YouTube and The Roku Channel, both hitting their highest-ever shares of TV time. 📈 YouTube hit 12.4%, marking its third straight monthly record. Since January, it’s added 1.6 percentage points, and it’s up nearly 3 full points since last April. That’s serious momentum. 📺 The Roku Channel also hit a new high, 2.4% of TV watch-time in April. Its viewership has jumped 21% since November, coinciding with Roku’s rollout of access to HBO MAX TV and other streamers right from its platform. Over the past year, Roku is up 67%, more than any other reported distributor. Meanwhile, cable and broadcast both declined, again. Cable slipped 1%, while broadcast fell 3.1%, now making up just 22% of total TV use. As multiplatform strategies keep evolving, the winners are becoming clearer. Platforms that offer seamless, centralized access to more content are rising fast, and viewers are voting with their remotes. Full breakdown from Nielsen is linked below. 👇 #tv #streaming #news #nielsen #hollywood

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