At CES 2026, Anthony Wood, Roku’s founder, chairman, and CEO, offered a hint about the future of the company’s newest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambition to become a broader competitor in the market. Launched last August, the $2.99 per month streaming service offers ad-free access to library content, at a time when rival streamers are raising their prices.
“The opportunity for Howdy was — if you just look at what’s going on in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more expensive. They keep raising prices, and they keep adding larger and larger ad loads,” Wood explained at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “And so, the part of the market where it actually started — low-cost and no ads — is gone now. There’s no streaming services that address that portion of the market.”
The exec also suggested that Roku intends to bring Howdy to a broader market than just Roku customers, saying that while it started on Roku, the company “will take it off-platform as well.”
Asked to clarify offstage if that meant mobile apps, the web, and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch the company has not yet said where, specifically, it plans to bring Howdy, but that “we want to distribute it everywhere.” That seems to suggest that Howdy could be an app that you one day load on any device, large or small. Wood declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, but said onstage, “I think if I just look at the market, it’s going to be a big streaming service.”
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