Roku’s $3 streaming service Howdy is coming to other platforms, the CEO says

At CES 2026, Anthony Wood, founder, chairman and CEO of Roku, offered a hint about the future of the company’s newest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambition to become a broader competitor in the market. The $2.99-a-month streaming service launched last August and offers ad-free access to library content, at a time when rival streaming companies are raising their prices.

“Howdy’s opportunity was — if you just look at what’s happening in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more and more expensive. They keep raising prices, they keep adding bigger and bigger ad loads,” Wood explained at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “So the part of the market that I actually started in — low cost and no ads — is now gone. There are no streaming services that address 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 “take it off-platform as well.”

When asked to clarify 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.” This seems to indicate that Howdy could be an app that you can one day download onto any device, big or small. Wood declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, but said on stage: “I think if you just look at the market, it’s going to be a big streaming service.”