Speaker Jacinto Roca

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Jacinto Roca

CEO and Founder

Rakuten TV

Jacinto Roca (Barcelona, Gavà, 1976) is a Spanish entrepreneur and cofounder of video-on-demand platform Wuaki.tv (2009) and current CEO of Rakuten TV (2012). Roca graduated at ESADE Business & Law School and at PIM International Management UCLA. He started his career in 1999 as a telecom strategic consultant at Diamond Cluster and in 2005 he founded the company SouthWing, working as a VP of Sales & Marketing.

While Roca was living and working in the USA, he noticed that entertainment consumption was changing and believed that the future of content distribution could be disrupted by internet-enabled TVs. With this vision, he founded Wuaki.tv in 2009, the first Smart TV native video-on-demand platform in Spain, long before these connected devices entered most homes in Europe. Roca has always believed in the disruption of the entertainment industry, as a revolution of both technological platforms for video-on-demand content, and in movie consumption habits, changing the timings of the industry and working closely with Hollywood studios to shorten theatrical release windows.  

In 2012, connected by a deep belief in the value of empowerment, Wuaki.tv became part of Rakuten, the Japanese internet giant led by Hiroshi Mikitani. Since then Wuaki.tv has expanded to 42 countries, becoming one of the leading video-on-demand platforms in Europe. In July 2017, the company was rebranded from Wuaki.tv to Rakuten TV, led by Roca as CEO.

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