Roku Sports Channel Is The Next Step In Roku’s Aggressive Pursuit Of Aggregating Content

A few years before the pandemic, a common refrain from consumers on traditional cable and satellite TV was, “Just give me my sports content,” a cry for content ala carte where having to get into bundles of channels that were of little to no interest added to the total cable bill. As time marched on, and streaming services blanketed the media landscape, many of those same consumers bemoaned that finding their sports content is too scattered. Going back to the future, in some respects where a single location to find their sports content might not be a bad idea.

Sensing this, Roku has aggressively chased sports properties to stream. Inking their first live sports deal with Formula E in 2023, they have been a juggernaut in pursuing sports content whether that’s Major League Baseball games with MLB Sunday Leadoff, The Rich Eisen Show, Boxing, or Roku Originals produced by the corresponding sports leagues such as the NFL’s Good Morning Football: Overtime, and NFL Draft: The Pick Is In.

On Monday, Roku steps further into this space with a dedicated free 24/7r ad-supported (FAST) premium channel called the Roku Sports Channel.

I spoke with Joe Franzetta, Head of Sports, Roku Media ahead of the Roku Sports Channel announcement about Roku’s strategy and how they have a leg-up on other competition given Roku is the key operating system platform for many smart TVs purchased around the world.

“What we do is we create the experience on the platform,” Frazetta said. “We work with our partners to ingest all of the content, whether it’s live or On Demand content, we’re organizing it and making sure that all the metadata structure is there to make it easily discoverable in our platform. They do the production. We use all the bells and whistles that we have to make it available to people and make it easy to find. So, we work closely with our partners on that organization, that look and feel to build the platform experience.”

Roku’s embedded platform in smart televisions sold means there’s a built-in audience. Along side streaming apps consumers download, the main interface has real estate to promote content.

Based on Roku’s latest financial report, Q2 of 2024 saw nearly 84 million streaming households, and increase of 2 million over Q1 of this year and a +14% increase year-over-year. Streaming hours on Roku totaled 30.1 billion for Q2 ’24, another sizable increase.

Frazetta describes Roku as “lead-in TV” – the idea of the first interface users see before making selections.

Asked about the deal with Major League Baseball, Franzetta said it’s been a great addition to the platform. “It’s gotten tremendously well,” he said. “It’s met and exceeded all of our expectations.”

“We looked at how can we build a comprehensive a destination as possible,” Frazetta added. “So again, clips and highlights of every single game, a new MLB fast channel, VOD. content that is always on and creates that ‘always-on’ experience for an MLB fan not only when the games are live, but at any point in time where somebody wants to consume MLB content. And it just so happened from a timing perspective, that the Sunday leadoff package was something that they were open to having a conversation about.”

The Roku Sports Channel opens the door to not only supporting what is currently in place, but provides a location for additional future expansion of sports properties.

“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 Franzetta in an announcement of the new 24/7 channel. “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 has been highly aggressive around sports, and that’s not likely to stop.

We’re going to continue to grow,” Franzetta said to me. “We’ve had a lot of success in a relatively short period of time. I think that’s due to the team we have in place, the platform itself, the ability of the platform to accommodate and house these experiences that we built the strategy of aggregating the content. I think we’ll continue to be thoughtful about how we approach the growth of the business. So, when you look at our overall sports strategy, it continues to revolve around the idea of creating that destination clarity of finding all the sports that you want.”