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 grow to be a broader competitor out there. Launched final August, the $2.99 per thirty days streaming service gives ad-free entry to library content material, at a time when rival streamers are elevating their costs.
“The chance for Howdy was — for those who simply take a look at what’s happening within the streaming world with streaming companies, they’re getting costlier. They maintain elevating costs, they usually maintain including bigger and bigger advert masses,” 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 companies that tackle that portion of the market.”
The exec additionally recommended that Roku intends to convey Howdy to a broader market than simply Roku prospects, saying that whereas it began on Roku, the corporate “will take it off-platform as properly.”
Requested to make clear offstage if that meant cellular apps, the online, and elsewhere, Wooden informed TechCrunch the corporate has not but mentioned the place, particularly, it plans to convey Howdy, however that “we need to distribute it in every single place.” That appears to recommend that Howdy could possibly be an app that you simply at some point load on any machine, massive 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 a giant streaming service.”
