Roku Says Its 1,200 Channels, UI Give Its Co-Branded TVs Robust Leg Up

LAS VEGAS -- Roku’s partnerships with TCL and Hisense, announced at CES this week, to incorporate its Roku TV reference path into co-branded smart TVs is “just one path for us,” Tom McFarland, Roku’s director of OEM business development, told Consumer Electronics Daily. The company still has its sights on the “millions” of TVs in households that will use the company’s set-top streaming players, including set-top boxes and Streaming Stick devices.

TCL said it would deliver TCL Roku TVs this fall in 32- to 55-inch screen sizes. The smart TVs will integrate Roku’s OS, providing access to the Roku streaming platform directly from the TV. Hisense also announced its H4 series Roku TV models in 32-, 39-, 40-, 48-, 50- and 55-inch models. Both TV makers said pricing and availability will be announced later in the year for the U.S. and Canada. Under the partnership agreements, Roku will manage the entire software ecosystem, including software updates that deliver new features and enhancements, while the TV makers will handle manufacturing and distribution within the U.S. and Canada.

Integration of Roku technology into TVs is a “natural progression” of the company’s streaming technology, McFarland said, but the company doesn’t plan to scale back on its other businesses. While the Streaming Stick is a “bridge product,” McFarland said it’s also being used in AV receivers, projectors and Blu-ray players. “There are other uses for it,” he said, saying “there’s no reason to think it won’t continue.”

Roku designed the main streaming board in the TVs and works with the TV companies to optimize the board with the Roku OS, McFarland said. While it will run with fast processors, McFarland said Roku’s platform is also optimized to run on a “low processing-power” system on a chip (SOC). Roku is using a dedicated TV SOC built by Sigma Designs, he said. He also called the Roku Streaming Stick a “natural progression,” citing a line of TCL TVs in that company’s booth that are all designed to work with the Streaming Stick. But integrating the Streaming Stick technology into a TV creates a “much tighter integration of the Roku OS,” he said.

The built-in Roku feature gives value TV lines a robust branded approach to smart TV, the company said. Roku’s goal is to make the solution “a very affordable smart TV,” it said. McFarland cited the steep price premium for other smart TVs on the market from LG, Samsung and Vizio and said Roku wants to make Roku TV “a TV for everybody.” Roku brings 1,200 channels on its platform and is adding about 90 channels every three months, McFarland said.

Roku is also touting the automatic input feature of Roku TVs that eliminates the need for consumers to know which input is associated with each source. Roku TV will recognize an input and “possibly put an icon on it” for a game console or cable box, he said. When the home screen comes up, “you'll either click on cable or one of your channels you're used to,” he said. “It takes the complexity out of input switching,” he said.

Roku plans to take input recognition a step further and help guide consumers through operation of connected devices, McFarland said. If a user wants to play a Blu-ray disc and the Blu-ray player isn’t on, a Roku TV will recognize that the player isn’t on through the input and instruct the user to power it up, he said. “We're doing different things as opposed to just listing HDMI 1, 2, 3,” he said. As the software platform for the TV, Roku manages the entire user interface, he said.

That will cover the TV tuners, too, McFarland said. For simplicity reasons, there will be no number pad on the TV’s remote controls, he said. “There’s no need to have a number keypad on a remote because if you switch to a cable box, you're going to pick up your cable remote which has all the numbers on it,” he said. Consumers who do use the built-in tuner will access that via drop-down menu, he said.

Roku is also touting ease of use on its platform, which has a revamped user interface that adds search capability and more channels on a screen in a grid format. The cross-channel search function allows users to find a movie by title without having to go to individual content providers such as Netflix and Hulu to find their palette of offerings, McFarland said. “Type in two or three letters of the movie title, and it will pre-populate with everything associated with that title,” he said.

At a CES where Sony, for one, made a splash with 4K streaming plans with Netflix, McFarland was quiet on the topic from Roku’s end, defaulting to company policy not to comment on products that haven’t been announced yet. “It’s a natural progression if you look at all the 4K TVs here,” he said of the CES show floor. He said consumers “can’t get 4K content from DVDs or Blu-rays because it’s not practical.” Streaming is the “logical progression to get 4K content to the TV."

Roku is set up as three business units, McFarland said. Set-top boxes will continue to be Roku’s “bread and butter,” but the content group is “constantly expanding” to manage the “vast channel base we have.” The third unit, the OEM segment, is looking to “proliferate the platform onto different devices,” he said. Today that segment addresses TVs and projectors, AV receivers and Blu-ray players. At CES it also announced a partnership with Voxx for an over-the-air antenna using the Roku Streaming Stick.

Mobile is important to Roku from the remote control app side and it’s becoming increasingly important for casting, where users discover a program via the app and then launch it through the TV. The Roku 3 can be operated by remote control or a smartphone app, he said.

Roku is also working on the automotive side as the idea of a connected vehicle is becoming more real, McFarland said. The challenge there is the bandwidth, McFarland said. The Roku platform will scale down from a 1080p to a 720p stream, he said, but at the outset downloading a show or a movie to a vehicle will be “pretty expensive,” he said. That, too, he called a “natural progression” with “all the entertainment in back seats.”