Kirby Grines
Founder and CEO, 43Twenty; Publisher, The Streaming Wars at 43twenty
Kirby Grines is the founder and CEO of 43Twenty, the streaming-positioning consultancy and content marketing agency, and the publisher of The Streaming Wars newsletter. His running editorial focus is engagement, frequency, and session length as the actual drivers of streaming-platform value — a frame that consistently cuts against the subscriber-counting consensus and pairs well with our CTV-OS, attention-economy, and platform-economics coverage.
Kirby Grines runs 43Twenty as a streaming-positioning consultancy with an editorial side that has become a tracked voice on its own — The Streaming Wars newsletter and full site (relaunched 2024) is the publishing surface where he tests the engagement-and-frequency thesis that anchors his recent commentary. The pre-history matters: his earlier company Float Left (co-founded 2009) built some of the first Roku apps before Roku had a category, which gives him standing on the CTV-OS layer most consultants don’t bring.
The frequency-not-scale thesis is the through-line of his recent posts. Netflix at 325M subscribers, in his framing, doesn’t need more users — it needs more attention per user, and growth at scale comes from session length and habit formation rather than geographic acquisition. He extends the same frame to Fortnite (players still there, session length down), to the Meta + YouTube engagement-products jury verdict on ‘products designed to drive frequency, extend sessions, and turn usage into habit,’ and to the Roku CTV-OS layer adding interactive home-screen experiences (games, trivia, event-based environments) that generate engagement in their own right rather than acting as a content-app traffic controller.
His same-day post on Parks Associates’ new CTV-OS share data — Roku at 28%, Samsung at 23% — is a representative recent read: he doesn’t restate the number; he reframes it as the home screen becoming the locus of CTV decision-making. That kind of framing is the citation-worthy material we pull when the underlying news crosses our slate.