While the Roku City real estate may be the headline offering this year, Roku also leaned into its scale, with Weird Al Yankovic opening its Newfront event to tout his recent film, and new Roku content and advertising chief Charlie Collier telling assembled buyers and brands that “Roku is not fighting for turf in the streaming wars, Roku is the turf.”
Roku’s scale as the platform of choice for streaming TV is well known in the industry, a fact also underscored by another data point that came up in the presentation: Of all households that streamed the last Super Bowl, half were doing so on Roku devices. Other offerings included home and garden and sports experiences, which will collect content from those genres and allow for sponsors to surround that programming, new commerce offerings, and a “primetime reach guarantee,” that will let advertisers “buy with assurance that their campaign will reach more TV households in primetime with Roku than the average program on a top-five cable network on traditional TV,” per the company.
Roku’s content announcements all leaned heavily into reality and unscripted fare , but that should also allow them to run without concern from the ongoing writers strike.