Netflix has its towering complex in Hollywood. Disney Plus has its famed Burbank, Calif., lot. But it may be an anonymous office park in Herndon, Va. — next door to a used-computer store just four miles from Dulles Airport — where some of the most cutting-edge streaming work is being shaped.The space houses the roughly dozen employees of Bob Ross Inc., which controls its namesake’s likeness and steers its future, fielding the numerous licensing suitors who blow up its suburban phone lines.
Run by a little-known family-business executive named Joan Kowalski, the firm has turned a public-television painter who died 26 years ago into a supremely unlikely hero of the digital video age.