At CES 2026, Roku founder, chairman and CEO Anthony Wood hinted about the future of the company’s latest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambition to become a broader competitor in the market. The $2.99 per month streaming service launched last August offers ad-free access to library content, at a time when rival streamers are raising their prices.
“Howdy there was the opportunity — if you look at what’s going on in the streaming world with streaming services, they keep getting more expensive. They keep raising prices, and they keep adding bigger and bigger ad loads,” Wood told the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “And so, that part of the market where it really started – low cost and no advertising – is now gone. There are no streaming services addressing 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 debuted on Roku, the company would “take it off-platform as well.”
Asked to clarify outside the platform whether that means mobile apps, the web, and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t yet said where specifically it plans to bring Howdy, but “we want to distribute it everywhere.” It appears that Howdy could be an app that you can 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 will be a big streaming service.”
