At CES 2026, Anthony Wood, founder, chairman, and CEO of Roku, hinted at the future of the company’s newest streaming channel, Howdy, and its ambitions to become a broader competitor in the market. Launched last August, the $2.99-a-month streaming service offers ad-free access to library content, while rival streamers are raising their prices.
“The opportunity for Howdy is there — if you just look at what’s happening in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re going to be more expensive. They’re going to keep raising their prices, and they’re going to keep adding a lot of bigger and bigger ads,” Wood said at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES. “Therefore, the segment of the market that actually started – cheap and without ads – is now gone. There is no streaming service that addresses that segment of the market.”
The exec also suggested that Roku intends to bring Howdy to a broader market than just Roku customers, saying that while it’s starting on Roku, the company “will also break the platform.”
Asked to clarify offstage if that means mobile apps, the web, and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t said where, specifically, it will bring Howdy, but “we want to deploy it everywhere.” It seems to show that Howdy can be an app that you will load on any device, big or small. Wood declined to share subscriber numbers with TechCrunch, but said on stage, “I think if I just look at the market, it’s going to be a huge streaming service.”