Roku’s $3 streaming service Howdy will come to other platforms, CEO says

At CES 2026, Anthony Wood, Roku’s founder, chairman, and CEO, presented the company’s vision for the future, Howdy, and its desire to become a competitive competitor in the market. Launched last August, the $2.99-a-month streaming service offers ad-free access to library content, at a time when advertisers are raising their prices.

“Howdy’s opportunity was – if you just look at what’s happening in the world of mixed services, it’s becoming more and more expensive. They keep raising prices, and they just keep adding advertising assets,” Wood explained at the Entertainment Diversity Conference at CES. “And as a result, the market segment that started – cheap and ad-free – is now gone.

The exec also said that Roku wants to bring Howdy to a wider market than Roku customers, saying that although it started on Roku, the company will “remove it from the platform.”

Asked to elaborate on whether that means mobile apps, the web, and elsewhere, Wood told TechCrunch that the company hasn’t said where, specifically, it plans to bring Howdy, but that “we want to distribute it everywhere.” This seems to indicate that Howdy could one day be an app you download on any device, big or small. Wood declined to share subscription numbers with TechCrunch, but said on stage, “I think once I look at the market, it’s going to be a huge marketing effort.”