Rose Hulse founded ScreenHits TV in London in 2012 when the streaming wars hadn't yet been named. By 2023 she had signed the first global deal to put a TV streaming platform inside a car — and done it in 56 countries at once.
Today's Builders · The Black Executive Journal™ Santa Monica, CA / London, UK · Media Technology & Streaming · ScreenHits TV · Founded 2012
— Born in Santa Monica, California; raised in a family of three siblings; was a young classical musician and competitive figure skater before pursuing business; holds a BS in business administration from California State University, Northridge, with additional study at the University of Southern California
— Began her career in politics working for Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan in international trade; shifted to media and publishing, working for Weider Publications, The Hollywood Reporter, NBCUniversal, and the Sundance Institute before relocating to London and founding her own company in 2012
— Founded ScreenHits Limited in London in 2012 as a B2B media content sales streaming platform — a digital marketplace for content buyers and sellers at a time when Mipcom and physical markets were still the industry standard; self-funded the startup in its infancy alongside her parents with a team of eight people
— Pivoted the business in 2019 from B2B content sales to a direct-to-consumer streaming aggregator — a single platform allowing subscribers to access all their streaming services in one interface — at a moment when Netflix, Amazon, Roku, and Apple all had billions behind them and the prevailing market opinion was that ScreenHits could not compete
— Closed $2 million in Series A funding in October 2020, bringing total funding to $6 million, backed in part by Britain's Future Fund, the UK government's program matching investment for British entrepreneurs; total funding has since reached £6 million
— By May 2021, ScreenHits TV was approaching 500,000 subscribers across the U.S. and UK with a base subscription of $0.99/month, aggregating 32 streaming services including Amazon Prime, Disney+, Paramount+, and Hulu, with plans to expand into Austria, Switzerland, Latin America, and Canada
— In March 2023, signed a global deal with Porsche — the first deal of its kind in history — to integrate ScreenHits TV as the main Smart TV launcher inside Porsche vehicles, beginning with the Cayenne model year 2024; the agreement covers 56 territories and gives Porsche customers access to premium streaming platforms, fast channels, and live TV through the ScreenHits interface across the Porsche Connect network; the service now spans 63 markets and over 1,500 content catalogues
— Named one of the 50 most influential professionals in the UK's OTT industry by VOD Professional in 2021 and 2023; listed among Variety's inaugural Silicon Valleywood Impact Report; named to Business Cloud's UK 100 MediaTech Innovators; named by Forbes as one of their Black-Owned Businesses You Need to Know
— Won Entrepreneur of the Year in the Senior Leaders category at the Black British Business Awards 2025; ScreenHits TV won Business of the Year at the 2025 Black Powerlist Awards
— Member of the International Academy of Television Arts and Sciences; member of the British Screen Forum; serves on the committee of the Television and Radio Industries Club (TRIC Awards); board of trustees member of the Museum of the Home, appointed 2023; sits on the Young Ambassadors Steering Committee for the National Gallery
Rose Hulse did not grow up planning to disrupt the streaming industry.
She grew up in Santa Monica, California, the daughter of Leon and Maxine Adkins, with three siblings, a childhood spent on ice rinks and with a classical music instrument in hand.
The discipline those pursuits required — the early mornings, the repetition, the insistence on precision — turned out to be more useful preparation for entrepreneurship than any MBA.
She studied business administration at California State University, Northridge and took additional coursework at USC before beginning her career in an unexpected place: politics. She worked for Los Angeles Mayor Richard Riordan in international trade, gaining early exposure to the mechanics of institutional relationship-building across borders.
Then she moved into media — Weider Publications, The Hollywood Reporter, NBCUniversal, the Sundance Institute — working in sales and distribution, learning how content moved between producers, platforms, and buyers.
It was at Sundance that the idea that would become ScreenHits first formed. She watched indie films premiere at the festival and then disappear — no platform, no buyer, no audience.
The question she kept returning to was why there was no centralized digital marketplace where content buyers from anywhere in the world could browse, evaluate, and acquire the films they wanted.
Vimeo and YouTube were demonstrating that digital distribution was the direction.
The industry had not yet caught up.
In 2012, she relocated from New York to London and founded ScreenHits Limited. She and her parents funded it. The team was eight people. The pitch was that the future of content sales was digital — and that she was going to build the infrastructure for it.
Not everyone agreed. "
When I started out," she has said, "a lot of feedback I got was why would people go to a digital platform when they had Mipcom and Cannes? Why would they want to work with a company that's going to be so disruptive and eventually take their jobs away? We were kind of in an uphill battle."
She stayed in the uphill battle.
For seven years, ScreenHits operated as a B2B media content sales platform — a niche, functional business that did not make headlines but built something more durable: direct relationships with the largest companies in media. Disney. TBS. Netflix. Amazon. BBC.
The pitch was consistent: digitize the content sales process, reduce the inefficiencies of physical markets, let buyers see what they want to acquire at any price point from any location.
Some people in the industry were excited.
Others were resistant.
Hulse pushed through both responses methodically, attending Mipcom booths, taking the meetings, and building the institutional credibility that would later matter enormously.
Then, in 2017, the market shifted.
Studios that had been licensing content to third-party streaming platforms began pulling rights back. Hulse and her team started noticing a sharp drop in licence renewals. She called clients to ask what was happening.
The answer was consistent: mandates from the top to reclaim content rights ahead of launching proprietary streaming services. Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock, Paramount+ — all were in development.
The direct-to-consumer streaming explosion was coming.
"We did a pivot," Hulse has said, "which felt like a natural progression really. Across the years we had really perfected our technology and aggregation tool, so I thought why not use this technology to aggregate all of these different streamers that would soon be on the market?"
The consumer-facing streaming aggregator — what ScreenHits TV became in 2019 and launched publicly in May 2020 — was built on seven years of B2B infrastructure, industry relationships, and proprietary technology.
By the time the market was ready for a single-interface streaming solution, Hulse had already built one.
The consumer problem ScreenHits TV addresses is structural and measurable.
As Hulse explained to The Hollywood Reporter at the time of the Series A close: customers were spending 90% of their time on one streaming app out of all the apps they subscribed to — leaving the rest underused, which led directly to subscription cancellation.
Discovery across multiple platforms required switching between apps, logging in separately, and having no unified view of what was available or recommended across all services.
ScreenHits TV aggregates the streaming services a consumer already subscribes to into a single interface — unified search, unified discovery, unified recommendations across all platforms.
The base subscription was priced at $0.99/month in the U.S. and equivalent in the UK and Europe.
The model was not to compete with Netflix or Amazon on content but to sit above them — a navigation layer that added value for consumers and reduced churn for providers simultaneously.
By May 2021, the company was approaching 500,000 subscribers in the U.S. and UK, aggregating 32 streaming services including Disney+, Amazon Prime, Paramount+, Hulu, Starz, BBC, ITV, and Shudder.
The Hollywood Reporter, Variety, Deadline, and Glamour had all covered the company.
Business Cloud named ScreenHits TV to its UK 100 MediaTech Innovators list. Variety placed it at the top of its inaugural Silicon Valleywood Impact Report.
The company had been built against the consensus. "People thought I was crazy," Hulse has said, "because there was Amazon, Roku and Apple with billions of dollars behind them. The general consensus was, 'How is ScreenHits even going to make a mark out there?'"
The mark she made came from a strategic decision that distinguished ScreenHits from every well-capitalized competitor: no original content.
Ever.
"We're completely agnostic to that," she has said. "Our focus would always be on our partners' content and we would never have the issue of putting our own original programming front and center."
The platform's neutrality — its structural refusal to compete with the services it aggregated — was the commercial logic that made the Porsche deal possible.
In March 2023, Porsche announced that it had partnered with ScreenHits TV to provide an in-car portal for streaming entertainment across its vehicle fleet.
The integration began with the Porsche Cayenne model year 2024 and covered 56 territories — making it, as both companies confirmed, the first global deal to put a TV streaming platform inside cars at that scale.
The agreement placed ScreenHits TV as the main Smart TV launcher within the Porsche Connect system, giving passengers direct access to their existing streaming subscriptions — Disney+, Amazon Prime, and others — along with live TV channels, through the ScreenHits interface on the vehicle's built-in screens.
Video streaming is available on the central display when the vehicle is stationary, and on the passenger display while the car is moving.
The deal extended ScreenHits TV's availability to 59 markets and 30 languages, with more than 1,000 premium streaming catalogues and fast channels across the Porsche Connect territory.
The platform has since expanded to 63 markets and over 1,500 content catalogues, with the automotive integration spanning the Cayenne, Taycan, Panamera, and 911.
Hulse was direct about the strategic logic at the time: "The car will become the second biggest screen, outside the house. As more and more people are starting to charge their vehicles, they're spending more time on the road. That's where they want to watch their content."
The Porsche deal was not a marketing partnership.
It was a technology integration — ScreenHits TV's aggregation platform embedded into one of the world's most recognizable luxury automotive brands, deployed globally on day one.
For a company that had raised £6 million total and been told repeatedly that it could not compete with Amazon and Apple, it was the clearest possible evidence of what the B2B years had actually built: relationships, technology, and a business that major institutions trusted.
Hulse has spoken publicly and repeatedly about the specific challenge she faced as a Black woman founder raising capital in the UK tech industry. She did not go to a prestigious university.
She did not have a tech background.
She did not have an established investor network. And she was, in her own telling, frequently told that while her idea was good, she was not the right person to execute it.
"I've really had to prove myself," she told Deadline in 2021. "I had a great idea, but I didn't go to Harvard, I didn't have a board behind me at the beginning, I didn't have experience in trading companies and I didn't have a tech background. A lot of people said to me, 'it's a great idea, but I don't think you're going to be the one to do it.' And that was disheartening."
Her Grazia opinion piece, titled "This Is What It's Like Trying to Get Investment as a Woman of Colour," addressed the systemic dimension of that experience directly — the pattern, not just the personal encounters. Business Cloud confirmed this framing in its own coverage: "VCs loved my idea but my face didn't fit."
She raised the capital anyway.
She built the product anyway.
In 2025 she won Entrepreneur of the Year in the Senior Leaders category at the Black British Business Awards — the same year ScreenHits TV won Business of the Year at the Black Powerlist Awards.
The streaming industry spent a decade building walls between platforms and calling it competition.
Rose Hulse built a door.
Getting Porsche to put that door in a car, in 56 countries, before any of the billion-dollar platforms had managed the same thing, is what happens when someone who was told she would not be the one to do it decides to do it anyway — and has seven years of infrastructure already built before anyone notices.
The following sources were used directly in the reporting of this profile. All factual claims are drawn from these documents.
Wikipedia — Rose Hulse Primary biographical reference; early life, education, career history, ScreenHits founding, Porsche deal, awards, board memberships, personal details https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rose_Hulse
Deadline — International Disruptors: ScreenHits TV's Rose Adkins Hulse (August 4, 2021) Early career at NBCUniversal and Sundance Institute; founding story and self-funding; B2B pivot narrative; subscriber growth to 500,000; 32 streaming services; pricing model; "didn't go to Harvard" quote sourced directly; advisory board hires confirmed; joint venture with Vial Content Tech confirmed https://deadline.com/2021/08/international-disruptors-screenhits-tv-rose-adkins-hulse-simplifying-streaming-landscape-breaking-down-tech-doors-1234808811/
The Hollywood Reporter — Super Aggregator ScreenHits TV Closes $2 Million in Funding (October 2, 2020) $2 million Series A confirmed; total funding to $6 million confirmed; Britain's Future Fund match funding confirmed; angel investors named; 90% of customer time on one app statistic sourced from Hulse directly; investor Atkinson quote sourced https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/general-news/super-aggregator-screenhits-tv-closes-2-million-in-funding-4070316/
Advanced Television / Broadband TV News — Porsche and ScreenHits TV in Global Streaming First (March 31, 2023) Porsche deal confirmed; 56 territories confirmed; Cayenne model year 2024 confirmed; "first global deal to put TV streaming into cars" confirmed; 59 markets, 30 languages, 1,000+ streaming catalogues confirmed; Hulse quotes sourced directly https://www.advanced-television.com/2023/03/31/porsche-screenhits-tv-in-streaming-deal/
3Vision — Inside Content Podcast: ScreenHits TV on Redefining Passenger Entertainment (2026) Platform expansion to 63 markets and 1,500+ content catalogues confirmed; Cayenne, Taycan, Panamera, and 911 integration confirmed; launcher model and content discovery architecture confirmed https://www.3vision.tv/news-insights/screenhits-tv-on-redefining-passenger-entertainment-through-automotive-streaming-integration
Just Auto — British company helps Porsche with streaming (March 31, 2023) Hulse quote on the car becoming "the second biggest screen" sourced directly; 50 employees confirmed; £6 million raised confirmed; profitability target confirmed https://www.just-auto.com/news/british-company-helps-porsche-with-streaming-report/
The Standard — Black British Business Awards 2025 winners revealed (October 18, 2025) Entrepreneur of the Year Senior Leaders award confirmed https://www.standard.co.uk/news/uk/black-british-business-person-2025-b1253466.html
NationalWorld — Black Powerlist 2026 Awards (October 27, 2025) ScreenHits TV Business of the Year award confirmed https://www.nationalworld.com/news/powerlist-2026-black-excellence-awards-winners-photos-5376562
Today's Builders is a series by The Black Executive Journal profiling the founders, operators, investors, and executives shaping Black and African business right now — the dealmakers closing rounds, the operators building institutions, the strategists entering new markets and constructing lasting economic infrastructure across the diaspora economy in real time.
