Charlie Collier’s Pay Package at Roku Topped $53 Million in 2022

A dad has been left struggling to his pay bills and feed his family after £1million was withdrawn from his Barclays bank accounts.

In one of the biggest twists of the 2023 upfront, Fox opted not to renew its highest rated scripted series, 9-1-1. The drama, produced by 20th Television, was instead picked up for a seventh season by 20th TV sibling ABC.

EXCLUSIVE: Coda star Emilia Jones is set to star in romance Charlie Harper, which Picture Perfect Federation is launching for sales at next week’s upcoming Cannes market.

Finding love on and off screen. Charlie Heaton and Natalia Dyer have settled into their own routine when they aren’t filming Netflix’s Stranger Things.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor As streaming video continues its ascendancy, cable, satellite and internet TV providers in the U.S. turned in their worst subscriber losses to date in the first quarter of 2023 — collectively shedding 2.3 million customers in the period, according to analyst estimates. “We are watching the sun beginning to set” on the pay-TV business, SVB MoffettNathanson senior analyst Craig Moffett wrote in a report Friday. With the Q1 decline, total pay-TV penetration of occupied U.S. households (including for internet services like YouTube TV and Hulu) dropped to 58.5% — its lowest point since 1992, two years before DirecTV launched as a new rival to cable TV, according to Moffett’s calculations. As of the end of Q1, U.S. pay-TV services had 75.5 million customers, down nearly 7% on an annual basis.

Charlie Day is well-aware that we know him for his voice—his raspy, high-energy chaos in “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia” has helped make it one of TV’s longest-running shows, and his softening of those vocal cords to voice Luigi is part of one of this year’s most successful movies, “The Super Mario Bros.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor After record-breaking growth in 2021, U.S. internet ad revenue slowed last year — but continued to show double-digit growth. That’s according to the 2022 annual ad revenue report from the Internet Advertising Bureau trade group, conducted by PwC. Between 2021-22, U.S. internet advertising revenue grew 10.8% year-over-year to a total of $209.7 billion, compared with 35.4% surge the previous year, per the study. In 2022, digital ad spending saw the highest growth in Q2 (21.1%) followed by Q2 at 11.8% before slowing in Q3 (8.4%) and Q4 (4.4%). By comparison, U.S. TV advertising revenue in 2022 grew 2%, to $71 billion, according to estimates from PwC’s Entertainment and Media Outlook 2022-2026 report.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Roku is reinvesting in — and bulking up — its originals lineup, announcing a new season of “The Great American Baking Show” and an unscripted comedy featuring singer-songwriter Charlie Puth among the shows coming to the Roku Channel. Notably, the content announcements at Roku’s 2023 NewFronts presentation — coming on Day One of the WGA writers strike — were unscripted/reality formats. Also at the event in New York Tuesday, the streaming platform unveiled a suite of new ad solutions, including sponsorships for its popular Roku City screensaver. The company announced that it has renewed reality competition series “The Great American Baking Show” for Season 2. The news came ahead of the premiere Friday, May 5, of the new six-episode run of the show featuring Paul Hollywood, Prue Leith, Ellie Kemper and Zach Cherry (pictured above, left) on the Roku Channel. “The Great American Baking Show,” produced by Love Productions USA, ran for five seasons on ABC as a spinoff of original hit “The Great British Baking Show” before it was picked up last year by Roku. The streaming company previously acquired U.S. rights to dozens of episodes in the “Great Baking Show” franchise for a FAST channel. Roku will also bring back the holiday special of “The Great American Baking Show,” which will feature all-new celebrity bakers and debut this upcoming holiday season.

Roku is expanding its 2023-2024 slate with new series from Charlie Puth, Reese Witherspoon, Zoe Saldana, Juanpa Zurita and more, the streamer announced during its IAB NewFront presentation in NYC Tuesday.

Charlie Collier, who segued last fall from lengthy exec stints at Fox Corp. and AMC Networks to a top post at Roku, took the stage at his first NewFronts pitch Tuesday to invite advertisers to bring their messages to the stream.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Sound Ventures, the venture-capital firm co-founded by Ashton Kutcher and music manager Guy Oseary, is looking to back “category-defining” artificial intelligence businesses. The VC firm announced that it has closed Sound Ventures AI Fund, oversubscribed at nearly $240 million. The fund seeks to invest in AI businesses at the foundation model layer. Currently, the fund’s portfolio of companies includes OpenAI, Anthropic and StabilityAI. Kutcher, Oseary and Effie Epstein lead Sound Ventures as general partners. According to the partners, AI technology has “reached a stage of usability across enterprises and consumers that is driving significant growth,” and that the Sound Ventures team has experience in two industries at the heart of generative AI: technology and entertainment.

EXCLUSIVE: Madison Iseman (Jumanji franchise), Aaron Dominguez (Only Murders in the Building), Antonia Desplat (Shantaram) and Charlie Tahan (Ozark) have signed on to star alongside Stranger Things‘ Jamie Campbell Bower in Chuck Russell’s remake of the ’80s supernatural horror Witchboard, which is now in production in Montreal.

Brian Steinberg Senior TV Editor After an enviable career working for traditional TV outlets, Charlie Collier surprised many a media executive late last year by leaving a senior job running entertainment programming for the Fox broadcast network to join Roku, the company that gives millions of Americans their access to the world of streaming. He hopes advertisers will follow. On Tuesday, Collier, 53, now heading Roku’s ad sales and development of content on its own platforms, will be pressed to show potential sponsors why. Roku, which boasts 71.6 million active accounts, will make a big pitch to Madison Avenue as part of a group of industry “newfront” sessions. Even though NBCUniversal, Disney and their rivals won’t make similar outreach until May, presentations this week from digital players such as Amazon and Roku are seen as an aggressive bid to win ad dollars that might previously have gone to the TV companies. After all, the networks, one secure in their ability to deliver media’s biggest audience, are losing viewers to streaming, and Roku is one of the biggest facilitators of that activity.

AMC Entertainment chief executive Adam Aron saw compensation last year totaling $23.7 million, up 25% from $18.9 million in 2021, according to an SEC filing Friday. That included a base salary of $1.5 million, a $6 million cash bonus, and stock awards valued at $16.2 million.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Jeff Shell, the former chief executive of NBCUniversal, forfeited stock grants and options worth $43.3 million after he was fired for cause earlier this week, according to a Comcast regulatory filing. Shell was terminated as CEO of NBCU over the past weekend after an internal investigation into his relationship with Hadley Gamble, an international correspondent for CNBC. “As previously disclosed, Mr. Shell’s employment was terminated with cause on April 23, 2023. As a result, he did not receive any supplemental payments or benefits in connection with his termination,” Comcast said in its 2023 proxy statement. “He will receive only his accrued but unpaid base salary and vacation time, vested employee benefits and reimbursement for any unreimbursed business expenses in accordance with his employment agreement.”

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Triller reached an agreement with Sony Music Entertainment to pay $4.57 million to settle the music label’s breach of agreement lawsuit against the TikTok-style video sharing app, according to a court fling. Triller has admitted liability in the dispute, according to the filing, submitted by Sony Music’s lawyers April 26 to the federal district court judge in the case. Reps for Triller did not respond to a request for comment Friday. A Sony Music spokesman declined to comment. “Prompt entry of judgment is needed to protect against any further dissipation of Triller’s assets or, worse still, a bankruptcy filing,” Sony Music said in the request for the court to rule on the consent agreement. “Triller is more than a year late on some of those contract payments and Sony Music should not have to wait longer to enforce a judgment to collect.”

a company’s SEC filing published Thursday revealed. Other compensation totaled $25,245.

Charlie Collier, who took over as President of Roku Media in late October, had a pay package that topped $53 million in the last three months of 2022.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Amazon, in the midst of paring back its workforce, topped Wall Street forecasts with better-than-expected revenue growth for the first quarter of 2023. The company reported Q1 revenue of $127.4 billion, up 9% year over year, improving over a 7% rise in the year-earlier quarter but still off its historical pace of top-line growth. Net income was $3.2 billion, or 31 cents per share, compared with a net loss of $3.8 billion in Q1 2022 (which included a $7.8 billion loss on its stake in electric-vehicle maker Rivian). The results come as the ecommerce colossus is in the middle of laying off 9,000 workers, on top of the 18,000 job cuts announced in January. On Thursday, the company laid off about 100 employees at Amazon Studios and Prime Video.

Todd Spangler NY Digital Editor Roku came in above analyst estimates on the top line for the first quarter of 2023, as it gained 1.6 million active streaming accounts in the period. But the company told investors that the macroeconomic environment was still “challenged” in the quarter. The company posted Q1 sales of $741 million, up 1%, and a net loss of $193.6 million, or $1.38 per share. On average, Wall Street analysts were expecting Roku to post Q1 of $708.49 million and a net loss of $1.37 per share. Click here to sign up for Variety’s free Strictly Business newsletter covering earnings, financial news and more.