Roku is launching a dedicated creator hub and multiple new FAST channels on its platform, the company told The Hollywood Reporter exclusively.
Lisa Holme, head of content for Roku Media, said the platform will increase the amount of licensed programming from top creators, with new FAST channels from Prof G Podcast, iShowSpeed, Jesser, Stokes Twins, and other creators joining the service.
Holme pointed to audience behavior data as the driving force behind the move. "We just see that the demand among both audiences and, really significantly, advertisers has just continued to grow, and as Roku thinks about its content offering, we want to make sure that we have a good selection of anything that a consumer wants to watch," Holme told The Hollywood Reporter. She added that the platform has been responding to signals from its users. "The viewership on [creator content on Roku Channel] has continued to grow, so that's one signal of increased demand, and then we also see what people are searching for, whether they're watching it with us or not, and we just have seen the search traffic for this type of content, and for specific creators, and for genres of creator content has has gone up."
The new creator hub will include both licensed creator content and programming from Roku partners like Peacock and HBO Max. Users who click through to partner programming will be redirected to those apps.
Holme said the hub is designed around what viewers are already looking for. "The goal is to just make it easier for them to get to, since we already know they're looking for it," she said.
The platform is also in active conversations with larger YouTube creators. Roku's pitch is that it can deliver audiences not currently reached on the Google-owned platform, an argument similar to the one Netflix has made to creators, though Roku's offering is free.
"I think the first thing we're looking for is, do they have a big audience and a big following that suggests there may even still be untapped audiences? Because Roku is generally going to provide an incremental audience than whoever they may be already reaching on YouTube," Holme said.
The new hub will also surface content from across the broader Roku ecosystem. "We've really pulled from kind of across the whole ecosystem and tried to present it in a way that will really help our users find what they're interested in, and so there are reality shows from Peacock that have influencers in them, just to name an example," Holme said. "It's really kind of the distinction of what Roku can do uniquely, which is we have every app on the platform, and we have deep integrations with most of those apps for search and browse, so that we can surface their content at the platform level, at the video level."
