At CES 2026, Roku founder, chairman and CEO Anthony Wood gave a hint about the future of the company’s new 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 competing streamers are raising prices.
“The opportunity for Howdy was if you just look at what’s happening in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more and more expensive. They’re continuing to raise prices and they’re continuing to add larger and larger advertising burdens,” Wood explained during the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “And so the part of the market where this actually started – low cost and no advertising – is gone now. There are no streaming services that cater to that part of the market.”
The executive 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 “remove it from the platform as well.”
When asked to clarify offstage whether that means mobile apps, the web and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t yet said where, precisely, it plans to take Howdy, but that “we want to distribute it everywhere.” This seems to suggest that Howdy could be an app that you’ll one day load onto any device, big or small. Wood declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, but said on stage: “I think if I just look at the market, it’s going to be a big streaming service.”
