Roku is Adding Subscriptions to Premium Services From Showtime and Others

Roku has a large library of free content available, from TV shows and movies, but it looks like a bit of a premium mix is heading to the platform as well.

TechCrunch has the report out this week that Roku is officially adding premium subscription content from a variety of sources. That includes Showtime, CuriosityStream, EPIX, Dropout from College Humor, Baeble Music, Magnolia Selects, Smithsonian, Fusion, Viewster Anime, Noggin, and several others.

“Offering a centralized place to subscribe to paid content is a fairly significant change for Roku’s platform where, historically, viewers would download and add apps (“channels,” in Roku’s lingo) to their Roku homepage for each service they wanted to watch. Some of those channels require subscriptions, like Netflix and Hulu, while others offer free content.”

This is a pretty big change for Roku and should align the company more in the likes of Hulu, Amazon Prime, and other options out there. Interestingly enough, it has also been rumored that Apple is planning on launching its own similar option at some point in the future. The selection of premium options would also be available alongside the wide range of original content the company is planning on launching (supposedly sometime in 2019).

Looking ahead, the report also focuses on The Roku Channel, which has become a one-stop shop for a variety of content, including the news, sports, and TV shows. It has become one of the most-watched channels on the Roku platform.

“We’ve been focused on ad-supported content and will continue to have a very robust offering there. But there’s lots of great content that’s available only in subscription services,” explained Roku’s Vice President of Programming, Rob Holmes, as to why Roku wanted to introduce paid subscriptions. “We also wanted to try to improve the user experience in a lot of the same way that we did with the launch of The Roku Channel around ad-supported content,” he said.”

The new premium options will roll out beginning this month, and Roku says it will be available for all customers in early 2019. This is an odd thing to have roll out in such a way, but apparently this is the way it has to go for Roku platform owners. If you own a Roku, is this something you’ve been looking forward to?

[via TechCrunch]

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