Photos coutesty of Roku

Technology Law

At the Leading Edge of TV Technology

General Counsel Stephen Kay (’87) keeps TV streaming pioneer Roku moving forward at a competitive pace.

“We’re constantly dealing with novel issues,” says Kay (’87), general counsel for the television streaming company Roku. Succeeding in such an environment, where there aren’t well-worn paths to follow, requires being comfortable with ambiguity, he says. Technology companies also move quickly, so their attorneys need to be pragmatic and efficient with their time.

“To keep the business moving forward at the pace it needs to move forward to remain competitive,” says Kay, “we have to separate the significant issues from those that are more tolerable risks.”

One of the pioneers of TV streaming technology, Roku sells hardware and software that allow customers to stream content from services like Netflix and Hulu. The company also provides licensed and original content through The Roku Channel and sells targeted advertising—a relatively new industry that requires knowledge of ever-changing privacy laws. Roku was established in 2007 and has since experienced phenomenal growth. The company streams to more than 60 million customer accounts worldwide and recently reported 2021 total net revenue of $2.8 billion. The Roku operating system (OS) is the top selling smart TV OS in the US, representing more than one in three smart TVs sold.

In addition to serving as chief legal officer, Kay is a senior vice president at Roku and, as part of its leadership team, helps shape its business strategy.

The intersection of media and law has intrigued Kay since junior high, when he watched the Watergate hearings unfold on TV. The hearings, which led to the resignation of US President Richard Nixon, set him thinking about the power of the law and the power of the press, he says. He remembers being fascinated by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the Washington Post reporters who exposed Nixon’s wrongdoing, and riveted by Archibald Cox, the special prosecutor for the Watergate affair.

Kay later had the “incredible experience” of taking a constitutional law course from Cox, who served as a visiting professor at BU Law from 1985 to 1997. 

After completing law school, Kay moved to New York to work for a mid-sized firm (Squadron, Ellenoff, Plesent & Sheinfeld) with a strong media practice. He began in litigation, representing the New York Post, New York Magazine, and other media outlets in First Amendment cases. He soon took on management responsibilities and continued to play significant management roles after his firm merged with the much larger Hogan & Hartson.

With fifteen years of law-firm experience, Kay left Hogan & Hartson in 2003 to become general counsel and executive vice president at Gemstar-TV Guide.

“It was a very messy situation,” he says of Gemstar’s business. “The company was under investigation for securities fraud and was embroiled in a whole bunch of patent and antitrust litigation.” Kay joined a new leadership team committed to getting the business back on track.

“It turned out to be an amazing opportunity,” he says. “There was nobody left when I joined, so I had to build the legal team from scratch, effectively, and put corporate controls and processes in place and then, ultimately, resolve a lot of the litigation and investigations that were going on.” After five and a half years, Gemstar was in good enough condition to be acquired, and Kay returned to Hogan & Hartson to manage and grow its Los Angeles office and cochair its technology, media, and telecommunications practice group.

When the opportunity to join Roku presented itself in 2014, he couldn’t pass it up.

“It was the right company at the right stage of its growth and a great alignment with my skills and interests,” he says. “TV technology was a sweet spot for me, and it was clear at that time that Roku had real traction but also had huge potential.”

As general counsel, Kay oversees offices in multiple countries and supervises dozens of attorneys. His team supports every aspect of Roku’s business: government affairs, business transactions, product counseling and compliance, mergers and acquisitions, labor and employment, public company reporting and corporate governance, and more.

“I’ve got a team of about 70 people right now,” says Kay (‘87). “My department is bigger than the law firm I joined when I left BU.”

Kay enjoys the challenge of being involved in such a wide variety of legal issues. It’s also fun, he says, to work for a recognizable brand.

“Outside of work, people are interested in what I do,” he says. “‘Oh, you work for Roku? I love my Roku. I have three of them.’ I get that all the time.”

One of the highlights of Kay’s career was taking Roku public in 2017. He’d assisted with many initial public offerings (IPO) during his career, but never as inside counsel. An IPO involves compliance work, he says, and the creativity to frame the company’s story for potential investors.

“I’d always enjoyed that part of private practice, but it was even more enjoyable to do it from the inside because you really have the insights. You can add value that the other people in the room—the external advisors—can’t,” he says. “And the end of the process, ringing the bell at NASDAQ and all that stuff, was super fun. Outside lawyers don’t usually get invited to those things.”

Supporting the rapid growth of Roku means constantly recruiting new talent, and Kay has enjoyed building a team of smart lawyers who teach him as much as he teaches them.

“I learned at Gemstar how important it was to hire good people who have skills that are different from yours, and backgrounds that are different from yours. At Roku, we’re a very diverse group, by every metric of diversity.”

Roku’s business plan includes expanding into more non-US markets, so Kay is now hiring lawyers with significant international experience and several who are based outside the US. International expansion often requires adapting a business to be legally compliant and culturally appropriate in new markets. “For the legal team,” says Kay, “that means doing a lot of work understanding local country requirements, as well as customs and practices for our target international markets.”