Tom Rogers

Tom Rogers is an American media and technology executive. After starting out as a Wall Street lawyer and serving as senior counsel to a House of Representatives telecommunications subcommittee, he became the first president of NBC Cable, where he founded CNBC and set up MSNBC. He went on to run TiVo as president and chief executive from 2005 to 2016, has chaired several other media and tech companies, and was inducted into the Cable Hall of Fame in 2016.

His AI film work runs through Fountain 0, a studio the brothers Ash and Pooya Koosha launched in 2025 to make features entirely with AI, where he is executive chairman. He holds the same title at Claigrid, a cloud AI personalization company the brothers also founded, and he got to know Ash Koosha when Koosha worked for his cloud-computing business.

Rogers was executive producer of Fountain 0's first feature, Dreams of Violets, an AI-generated drama about the January 2026 crackdown on protesters in Iran that premiered at the Tribeca Festival that June. He has said a distributor who wanted the film pulled out on learning it was made with AI, and that the Tribeca slot followed a chat with the festival's co-founder Jane Rosenthal at a Knicks game.

He also executive produced the studio's second feature, Odysseus: The Fall, a take on Homer's epic released in September 2026, in which an AI rendering of his likeness plays Mentor. He has said its timing was meant to invite comparison with Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey, and that everyone whose image appears in a Fountain 0 film is to share in its revenue.

In interviews he has granted that AI filmmaking will cost some jobs, while arguing that it lifts the budget barrier for independent filmmakers and makes possible films that would not otherwise exist. He has added that the tools still call for real filmmaking skill rather than simple prompting.