At CES 2026, Anthony Wooden, Roku’s founder, chairman, and CEO, provided a touch about the way forward for the corporate’s latest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambition to turn out to be a broader competitor out there. Launched final August, the $2.99 per 30 days streaming service provides ad-free entry to library content material, at a time when rival streamers are elevating their costs.
“The chance for Howdy was — if you happen to simply take a look at what’s happening within the streaming world with streaming providers, they’re getting dearer. They preserve elevating costs, they usually preserve including bigger and bigger advert hundreds,” Wooden defined on the Selection Leisure Summit at CES. “And so, the a part of the market the place it really began — low-cost and no advertisements — is gone now. There’s no streaming providers that tackle that portion of the market.”
The exec additionally urged that Roku intends to carry Howdy to a broader market than simply Roku prospects, saying that whereas it began on Roku, the corporate “will take it off-platform as effectively.”
Requested to make clear offstage if that meant cell apps, the online, and elsewhere, Wooden informed TechCrunch the corporate has not but mentioned the place, particularly, it plans to carry Howdy, however that “we wish to distribute it in all places.” That appears to recommend that Howdy might be an app that you just someday load on any system, giant or small. Wooden declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, however mentioned onstage, “I believe if I simply take a look at the market, it’s going to be an enormous streaming service.”
