In a world full of different ways to watch and/or stream TV, Roku has always felt like The Little Engine That Could. It’s cheaper and not as flashy as the Apple TV box, and it works way better than the Firestick. Roku just keeps quietly building up the brand, including The Roku Channel, which offers free, ad-supported content. We have an AppleTV and a Roku, and the Roku is so much easier to use. On Tuesday, Roku announced that it’s launching a ad-free streaming service called Howdy. Howdy will have almost 10,000 hours of commercial-free streaming content for just $2.99.
Roku − which sells set-top streaming devices, smart TVs and has its own free, ad-supported streaming service, The Roku Channel − wants to make your streaming life cheaper and easier. And they’re doing it by introducing a new, low-cost service that won’t make you sit through commercials between episodes of your favorite old sitcoms.
USA TODAY can exclusively reveal that Roku is launching Howdy on Tuesday, Aug. 5: For just $2.99 a month, Roku device users can stream a library of “thousands” of titles and nearly 10,000 hours of content, all commercial-free. The movies and TV shows on the service come from partners such as Lionsgate, Warner Bros. Discovery and FilmRise.
Howdy will initially only be available on Roku devices, but has plans to roll out on mobile and other platforms “in the near future,” the company says.
Among the titles available on launch day are films like “Elvis,” “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “Back to the Future” and TV series like “Weeds” and “Party Down.”
Exclusively using “library content” might not seem as ambitious or expansive as many of the biggest streaming services such as Netflix, Disney+ or HBO Max, but Howdy isn’t trying to compete directly with them.
“We don’t think it’ll replace a ‘tier one’ streaming service,” Roku CEO Anthony Wood tells USA TODAY. “People have multiple streaming services and it will be a great complement.” Prices are rising on other streaming services in part because new original TV shows and movies are expensive to produce. Howdy will avoid that all together by essentially showing re-runs of content they know their users already enjoy.
“Library content is very popular and people like to watch it,” Wood says. “They spend a lot of hours watching it.”
Wood and Roku hope the rising costs of “tier one” services (Peacock is the latest to raise prices) are stretching viewers’ budgets enough to tempt them into trying something as cheap as Howdy, which they happily note is “less than the price of your morning coffee or a single movie rental anywhere else.” The service does not have a trial period, but users can cancel at any time.
There is plenty of opportunity for Howdy to find an audience, even exclusively on Roku devices. The company’s Roku Channel is the most-watched free, ad-supported TV service in the U.S., according to Comscore. Roku devices are in more than half of U.S. households, reaching 125 million people each day.
“This type of service doesn’t exist,” Wood says, hopeful that his new venture can fill a hole in the streaming market. “Add a bunch of extra movies and TV shows for three bucks a month and no ads! I mean, I think it’s great.”
I think this is a great idea. Even without offering new, original content, Howdy will absolutely compete with some of the other streamers. There are a lot of people, including Mr. Rosie, who comfort watch different shows and movies over and over again. Having an affordable service that offers those is a total game changer. I bet that very group of people will subscribe to the bigger streaming services whenever they want to catch up on original content and scale back down to Howdy during the off seasons.
Roku is also playing it smart because there’s a good chance that when the current administration crashes the economy, consumers will evaluate their discretionary spending, and expensive streamers will be at the top of the list. It’s a lot easier to justify cutting a $25 Netflix subscription than a $3 Howdy one. On that note, I will be paying attention to Howdy. I hope they stick to this business model and don’t start steadily raising their prices a year from now so that we’re eventually paying $10+ for it.