The year was 2017. Gas was $2.50 a gallon. Wonder Woman, Get Out, and Logan dominated the box office. The number one song was Despacito by Luis Fonsi, Daddy Yankee, and Justin Bieber. 2017 wasn’t that long ago, but in the world of TV streaming, five years is a long time.
At this time, our team analyzed the top search terms from users on Roku devices, and one word emerged again and again: “FREE.” People wanted easier access to free streaming movies and TV. Many Roku users had recently cut the cord, and did not want streaming bills to rival what they had paid for cable.
The Roku Channel launched in September 2017, offering streamers a lineup of quality movies and TV shows for free with fewer ads than linear TV. Today, The Roku Channel is a top five channel on the Roku platform that reaches 80 million people in the US.¹
Over the years, we’ve introduced many features and updates for The Roku Channel to create a better TV viewing experience for streamers on our own platform, and some have benefitted the broader streaming industry as well. To celebrate five years of The Roku Channel, here are some of our favorite streaming innovations:
While streaming is typically on-demand viewing, The Roku Channel has a Live TV Channel Guide which offers a linear TV viewing experience as well. We decided to categorize it in a simple way in June 2020, when we added a live, on-screen program guide that closely emulates the linear TV experience that we all remember.
Today, our Live TV Channel Guide helps streamers discover what's on more than 300+ live linear channels. This includes movies, lifestyle entertainment, sports, kids & family programming, news and weather, and local channels. The guide allows users to browse programming information to see what's streaming on a channel now and in the future, and is accessible through a handy purple tile in The Roku Channel. The best part...you can still watch your programming while scrolling through the guide.
TV watchers have craved a more relevant TV experience for quite some time. It’s one of the main reasons people cut ties with linear TV.
With that in mind, we use machine learning and first-party data to power a custom homepage experience on The Roku Channel. It’s why my Roku Channel home screen features lots of news choices and guilty pleasures like Hallmark Movies, Murder House Flip, and Gayme Show! My coworker gets a totally different experience when she logs in, with Family Feud, Die Hart, and programming for her children.
In June 2022, we launched a Spanish language destination on The Roku Channel in the United States, offering thousands of hours of content for Spanish-speaking and Hispanic audiences to discover and enjoy in one easy location. Streamers responded in a big way. Regardless of your background, the programming is great (be sure to check out our Roku Original Natural Born Narco!)
There are few simple pleasures like being able to pause TV. When I was a kid, that functionality felt futuristic. If you didn’t want to miss American Idol or a critical moment in a ballgame, you’d better be in front of the TV. Now pausing is expected.
When developing The Roku Channel, we hypothesized that the pause screen could represent an impactful canvas for advertising, and turns out we were right. Streamers love the ability to pause their programming whenever they want, and advertisers can seamlessly own that moment of ‘pause’ during a streamer's journey.
Yes, we have QR codes to transact on mobile, but the next frontier is to make shoppable experiences more seamless from the Roku remote. Roku recently announced the launch of shoppable ad experiences through a first-of-its-kind partnership with Walmart to make TV streaming the next e-commerce shopping destination. If you see a product you like, you can soon buy it immediately with the press of a button.
Thanks for celebrating with us and Happy Streaming! Want to see what The Roku Channel has to offer? Watch here.
¹ In Q2, The Roku Channel was a top 5 channel on the Roku platform in the U.S. by Active Account reach and by Streaming Hour engagement (Roku Q2 2022 Earnings);The Roku Channel reached U.S. households with an estimated 80 million people in Q4 (Roku Q4 2021 Earnings)