Roku is continuing its sports expansion.
The streaming company has made its mark on the sports landscape both through central navigation zones (from their overall Sports Zone through their NBC Olympics Zone, NFL Zone, and more) and specific programming (from MLB Sunday Leadoff games to Good Morning Football: Overtime and The Rich Eisen Show to documentaries like NFL Draft: The Pick Is In). Now, they’re launching a 24-7 free advertising-supported streaming TV (FAST) channel, Roku Sports Channel, which will go live this coming Monday, August 12.
Here’s more on that from a release they issued Wednesday:
Roku Sports Channel will feature a wide breadth of popular sports programming that Roku owns and licenses. Featured content will include live Major League Baseball games with MLB Sunday Leadoff, Emmy-nominated talk show “The Rich Eisen Show,” “GMFB: Overtime,” live races from Formula E, and sports-themed Roku Originals produced with some of the most popular leagues in professional sports, including “NFL Draft: The Pick Is In,” “WWE: Next Gen,” and “Fight Inc: Inside the UFC.” The channel will also include exclusive partner content, like classic boxing matches from Top Rank, combat sports from Swerve Sports, and high-stakes poker entertainment from PokerGO featuring the game’s most popular players.
“A curated always-on channel that leads our viewer through the wide variety of premium sports content available for free on The Roku Channel, Roku Sports Channel is an exciting addition to our expanding sports offering,” said Joe Franzetta, Head of Sports, Roku Media. “We continue to see audiences enjoy the familiar, lean-back experience FAST offers, especially with sports. Sports is one of our most popular channel genres on The Roku Channel, which makes us so excited to make it even easier for audiences to jump into Roku’s standout programming.”
Roku will continue to refresh and expand Roku Sports Channel with new and upcoming exclusive programming, including NBA G-League games and the Roku Original WNBA documentary “Renee Montgomery: A Radical Act.” Roku Sports Channel is available on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Streamers can access it through The Roku Channel’s Live TV Guide.
FAST channels are becoming a larger and larger part of the viewing experience in 2024, and it seems to make sense for Roku to launch a 24/7 sports one given their overall approach to free advertising-supported programming (including GMFB: Overtime and MLB Sunday Leadoff). And sports is an important area for the company. As Roku director of product for sports Drew Adams recently told AA around their NBC Olympic Zone, they see sports as a place where they can make a difference in uncomplicating streaming:
“We understood that sports were continuing to fragment week by week, month, month by month, with different rights holders coming into play or leagues with different distribution points. So when we evaluated where Roku could add value here, that was one area where we said ‘Well, we can really help, right? We can help the user here by making it easy for them to find sports content all in one place.'”
And now, Roku’s own sports content will be accessible on a 24/7 FAST channel in addition to individual navigation to events. As with all Roku Channel programming, this Roku Sports Channel will be viewable through Roku devices, the Roku app on other TVs and devices, and TheRokuChannel.com. We’ll see how much traction they’re able to gain with this, but the idea has some merit.
