Roku Aggregates Olympics Coverage Under Home Screen Listing

Roku partnered with NBCUniversal on a home screen experience designed to give customers “easy access” to the media company’s 5,500 hours of streaming coverage of the 2020 Tokyo Olympics via the Roku platform, the companies said Tuesday.

The experience is designed to help viewers organize viewing of the games, delayed by a year due to COVID-19, by channel and sport, said the companies. Roku is creating a path to NBCU’s streaming coverage of the games directly from the home screen, with the Olympics “hub” accessible from the left side of the screen, third only to the Roku home screen and its free Roku Channel content.

Clicking on the Olympics listing takes viewers to a hub with several sections: Free Daily Highlights; Extended Highlights, which require a free Peacock account; and Watch by Sport, which requires a live TV provider subscription. Viewers can select from 41 sports: high-profile events such as gymnastics, basketball, beach volleyball, and track and field, along with others including badminton, field hockey, table tennis and trampoline. Additional content includes features on athletes, “great moments” and “must-see” moments.

Roku’s instructions for viewing the Olympics shows the disparate state of TV among pay-TV and streaming channels and the confusing number of choices viewers have. A pre-games guide that’s running on Roku’s Olympics hub tells viewers how to get all the channels covering 339 medal events. Consumers with a traditional pay-TV subscription will have access to NBC, NBCSN, Golf Channel, USA, Telemundo, CNBC, Universo and The Olympic Channel via the NBC Sports channel on their Roku device. Viewers need to log in with cable or satellite credentials for access.

Cord-cutters with a streaming subscription to AT&T TV, fuboTV, Hulu with Live TV and Sling TV will have access to NBCSN, Golf Channel USA, CNBC, Telemundo, Universo and The Olympic Channel, but NBC is available only in “select markets,” said Roku. Roku’s how-to 2:13 promo video encourages customers to sign up for a free subscription to Peacock for Olympics content and NBCSN to watch live. Four live studio shows each day on Peacock will help fans catch up on events, it said.

Noting that this year marks an Olympics first for Peacock, Maggie Suniewick, president-business development and partnerships-direct-to-consumer, NBCUniversal, said the Roku hub “makes NBC Olympics content unmissable for streamers.”