Roku Channel Debuts ‘Live and Linear’ News Content, Plans Additional Partners

Roku is adding “live and linear” news content to its free, ad-supported Roku Channel, including the 24-hour ABC News Live stream, as well as “news feeds” from “premium” partners Cheddar, PeopleTV and Newsy, said the company Tuesday. The Roku Channel “continues to have, on average, approximately half the advertising per programming hour as compared to traditional ad-supported linear TV,” it said. Roku also is adding new content “discovery” features to the service through a “phased software rollout” that begins in May, the company said. “Collections” lets viewers dive deeper into their favorite content by theme, while a “Continue Watching” function lets customers easily get back into programs they previously started viewing, it said. “One of the things we found out through customer surveys is that news is a very popular category,” Shubhada Hebbar, Roku TV director-product development, told us Tuesday during a demo. “People want some live news on the Roku Channel, so what we’ve done is we’ve worked with a few networks” to bring live news and video feeds to the service, said Hebbar. “These are the partners we’ve sort of started off with, but like we added partnerships to some of the other content, we plan to do the same for news.” Since the Roku Channel launched in September, it has become the 15th most popular feature on the Roku platform, “based on the global streaming hours,” said Hebbar. It also started with more than 100 titles and now boasts 1,000, she said.