| Roku’s new moves: Roku is rolling out a new “Featured Free” section to its home screen, with ad-supported episodes from ABC, CW, Fox, Crackle, Freeform and others. While most of these episodes are also available for free through individual apps, the new section will put them all into one easily-accessible location. It’s an interesting shift in direction for Roku’s home screen, which for years has emphasized a wall of apps over content, but it makes sense for a company that increasingly sees ad-supported video as the heart of its business.
Roku is also expanding The Roku Channel–the company’s own collection of ad-supported movies and shows–to the web, along with some Samsung Smart TVs. Head to therokuchannel.roku.com on your phone, tablet, or computer to check it out. (As CordCuttersNews notes, you can also access the channel from the Fire TV’s web browser or Apple TV via AirPlay.) While it might seem strange for Roku to bring its own app to other platforms, in the end it’s all feeding into the same advertising business that Roku is pushing on its own devices (see above).
Catching up with FuboTV: Over at Fast Company, I wrote a lengthy profile of FuboTV, a little-known live TV streaming service taking on titans like AT&T, Dish Network, Hulu, and Google. Although Fubo’s rivals are much larger and better-funded–and have far more subscribers–the startup’s scrappiness has allowed it to introduce some new features faster (including 4K HDR streaming for the World Cup).
Fubo’s leadership seems unfazed by its competition, and the hope is that cord-cutters will come around once other companies stop running their services at a loss and shed their artificial price advantages. Whether that ever happens–or whether Fubo can hang in for that long–will ultimately decide the startup’s fate. |
