In the swing of summer, Roku is rolling out an OS update with new user experience features meant to make finding, tracking and browsing content on the streaming platform easier.
Announced Tuesday, all features are rolling out to Roku users in the coming weeks.
New to the Roku streaming platform are dynamic rows that highlight trending content on the platform, similar to Top content lists on major SVODs like Netflix and others. For Roku they include new Top 10 Movies and Top 10 TV Shows rows, which showcase the most-searched titles across Roku. The rows will be refreshed daily and can be found in the New & Popular, Movies and TV destinations within the TVOS.
And with the box office getting renewed consumer attention, Roku aims to make it easier for viewers to plan their next movie night with a new In Theaters Now row that prominently displays current theatrical releases. From there, users can watch trailers and add titles to their Save List to watch at home when they arrive on Roku. The CTV platform previously launched a Coming Soon movie row, allowing users to track new films heading to theatres.
Indeed, other streamers themselves have already looked to leverage the Roku user interface to promote theatrical releases, namely Warner Bros. Discovery for its recent Superman reboot. Ahead of the film’s July 11 weekend opener (which generated $125 million in domestic ticket sales), WBD did a custom promotional integration on the Roku platform, including a dedicated Superman destination and search platform takeover.
As for the latest updates, Roku is also making it easier for users to browse and preview content available on its native free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) service The Roku Channel via a new feature called Surf Mode.
The feature offers short, bite-sized clips of full-length TV shows and movies that are available to stream on the FAST. Users can scroll through the curated previews, which Roku said are powered by machine learnings. And they’re interactive in the sense that if users like something they see, they can click in to jump to the full-length title or opt to just skim or skip. Per Roku, the machine learning-powered feature is dynamic, so the more viewers surf, the more the experience adapts to what they like.
Also updated for The Roku Channel is a Newly Added section on the linear free streaming service’s live guide – meant to make it easier to see the latest channels added to the lineup.
Both the Surf Mode and Live TV Guide updates could welcome features to help users navigate a wide breadth of content available on the FAST, particularly considering content discovery in general continues to be a challenge on streaming and The Roku Channel itself now boasts a FAST lineup of over 500 channels.
In addition, premium subscriptions are getting more visibility – now appearing in the top recommendations row on the Roku platform. Growing its partner subscription business with Roku-billed subscriptions (including via Roku Pay) is one of the three areas that Roku CEO Anthony Wood previously said the company would put increased focus on to help accelerate platform revenue growth in 2025 and beyond. Roku’s platform revenue surpassed $1 billion for the first time in Q4 2024, attributed in part to growth in its subscription business.
Roku currently counts 90 million streaming households and is scheduled to report Q2 2025 results this Thursday, July 31.