Roku Takes Center Stage in Sports Streaming Ecosystem

In addition to being the platform to watch games on other streamers, Roku is quickly becoming a one-stop shop for all things sports.

It wasn’t that long ago that watching sports on television was a pretty straightforward proposition. There were only three channels to choose from, and each had a very limited scope of games to broadcast. Then, as cable TV became standard in homes across the United States, we saw a steady increase in the number of sports viewing opportunities. Next came the rise of regional sports networks (RSNs) that allowed fans to watch nearly every one of their local team’s games, which exponentially increased not only the number of contests to watch, but the number of outlets broadcasting those contests as well.

In more recent years, while streaming was slow to adopt live sports (or perhaps more accurately, sports were slow to adopt streaming), there has been a sudden and substantial rise in streaming-exclusive sporting events, and that trend is not likely to slow as
traditional TV continues to lose ground to streaming
.

As the fragmentation of sports rights seemingly continues unabated, there is one streaming company uniquely positioned to serve as a nexus for all of the disparate sports content scattered across linear and streaming TV. As
the largest streaming source in North America
, Roku  is already in over 90 million homes and welcomes 125 million people to its platform every day. In part, what makes Roku so popular is its engaging user experience and its expansive offerings of streaming partners.

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Not only can you find all of the
live TV streaming
services you need to watch every game available on linear television on Roku, but practically every subscription streamer that carries live sports is also available via the platform. And when you add in its growing collection of exclusive sports rights, Roku might just end up being the future home of all streaming sports.

“Given the scale and given the depth of the partnerships that we have on the distribution side, all of that content is readily available on our platform,” Roku’s head of sports Joe Franzetta told me last week. “And, it’s available in different ways through different means, depending on the partnerships.”

One of Roku’s most high-profile sports partnerships is with
Major League Baseball
. After previously being found on
Peacock
, last season, Roku became the home of the “MLB Sunday Leadoff” package of games that generally kick off the day’s baseball action. This week’s game will stream on Sunday, June 22 at 11:35 a.m. ET and will feature the first-place
New York Yankees
and AL East rivals, the
Baltimore Orioles
.

Roku officially signed onto the Leadoff package
more than a month into the 2024 season
, and while the streamer considered Year 1 a success, having a full offseason to prepare has made all the difference in Year 2.

“We had more lead time for working with sponsors … adding to the discoverability on the platform,” Franzetta said. “There’s a lot of little things that add up to bigger things, but making sure that there’s a lot of prominence on the platform for how to find and integrate MLB into  our experience [is key].”

That integration and discoverability are at the core of Roku’s sports strategy. Having a package of games is not just about attracting fans to watch a single contest, but instead about helping fully expose them to everything that Roku has to offer. Since every team plays on Sunday — barring inclement weather — it makes sense for the platform to encourage fans watching the Sunday Leadoff game to stick on the free
Roku Sports Channel
for additional content, or to find another game to watch via the wide variety of other streamers that are found inside the platform’s ecosystem.

But, it is about more than just being a streaming air traffic controller, guiding cord-cutters to their ultimate destination. Roku is also hoping to continue growing the scale of its service by crafting a more engaging — and in turn more essential — experience for all sports fans.

From educating general Roku users about Leadoff games via a jumbotron in the cultishly popular Roku City screensaver to helping reduce the friction for fans to find the games they want to watch, Roku is aiming to make the entire sports streaming process as easy and intuitive as possible. The platform has created sports hubs that not only can help get viewers to each and every game on the schedule, but they also have clips, highlights, shoulder content, sports talk, programming from the individual leagues, and more. For the ongoing
NBA
Finals, Roku is running a trivia contest that has been a hit with fans, but is also designed to be a gateway to make their sports viewing experience even more customized.

“We’ve launched an NBA trivia game inside of the NBA zone,” Franzetta said. “ That’s engaging, that brings people back in … and when they come back for that, they can personalize their experience and say, ‘Hey, I’m a Lakers fan, so I wanna make sure that … I’m gonna get more and more Lakers games elevated, clips and highlights, etc.’”

These sports zones are designed to make Roku a one-stop shop for all of your sports streaming needs. Ideally, they will be the place where you not only watch individual games, but where you catch up on games you missed, watch experts break down those games, and much more, regardless of what streamer they might be available on.

“ It’s a matter of constructing an experience that has a lot of different touch points that are front-of-paywall opportunities that we then integrate into that larger sports experience, the sports zones,” Franzetta said. “So as a viewer, we want to continually entice you to come back because all the sports you wanna watch are there. Sometimes there’s free, front-of-paywall, ad-supported sports; sometimes there’s something behind a partner’s subscription, but all of it’s available.”

Franzetta says that Roku takes a holistic approach to sports streaming, with every aspect of what the platform does helping to support every other aspect. If Roku can get a viewer to watch an exclusive game or sporting event on the Roku Sports Channel, the platform feels that it is much more likely to get them to watch other content on the platform as well, whether that is through a partner subscription service, or on one of the nearly 40 sports-focused free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) channels found within the
Roku Channel
.

As Franzetta watches sports on other platforms, he notices some very obvious ways that the Roku model benefits fans and leagues far better than the traditional viewing experiences do. For example, during the June 8 MLB Sunday Leadoff game between the
San Diego Padres
and the
Milwaukee Brewers
, the announcers promoted Roku’s new documentary “Just a Bit Outside,” which tells the story of the legendary 1982 Brewers who lost Game 7 of the World Series in heartbreaking fashion to the
St. Louis Cardinals
. Then, immediately following the game on the Roku Sports Channel, the documentary aired, giving Brewers and baseball fans more incentive to stay tuned into Roku and its advertisers.

That is just one of the benefits of Roku’s ad-supported, linear approach to sports broadcasting. Most other sports streamers utilize dedicated feeds for each contest, and once the event is over, the feed abruptly goes dormant, forfeiting the attention of the viewers who came to the platform.

“ When streaming platforms have live sports, and when the event is over, it says, ‘This event is over. Thanks for watching,’” Franzetta said. “I always think you’ve got this big audience that you could have put somewhere else. And so that’s at least part of why we launched Roku Sports Channel.”

In addition to the Leadoff package with Major League Baseball, Roku also has
exclusive rights with Formula E racing
, NWA wrestling, and
Bassmaster fishing tournaments
, and as of this year, Roku is the
exclusive home of both the Winter and Summer X Games
; the  Summer X Games will take place in Salt Lake City, Utah from June 27-29.

While Franzetta wouldn’t say whether or not Roku plans to pursue other marquee sports rights like the
NFL
, which could be looking for
new broadcast partners in five years
, he did say that anything is possible if the partnership fits Roku’s larger strategy.

“From a strategic standpoint, we continue to look at opportunities through those various lenses to say, ‘Is there an underserved audience here? Is that underserved audience on Roku?’ The answer is probably yes, just because of the scale. ‘Is this a product that we believe in? What do we think the engagement is gonna be?’” he said. “You can bring a horse to water, but you can’t make it drink. But we’re very good at bringing the proverbial horse to the water.”

Ultimately, Franzetta sees Roku’s role in streaming as one in which everyone benefits. Obviously, Roku is a business, so the company has to have a financial incentive to innovate and take risks, but he believes that if the platform can do right by the leagues and the viewers, then the entire sports environment will be healthier for everyone involved. So, if Roku can come up with new ways to keep sports fans satisfied and engaged with the teams and leagues that they love — while also hopefully introducing them to new sports they might not be as familiar with — then everyone wins.

Franzetta said:

“This is about growing fandom over time. We’re an interactive platform; there’s so many things that we can layer onto this experience that don’t exist in a traditional linear environment. And we’re a business, of course, so we look at those things through the lens of what is the user experience, what is the opportunity for additional revenue streams; and as those additional revenue streams grow, the types of opportunities that we’re able to take a look at could change or they can expand. But for now, our North Star is really about aggregation and helping build that flywheel, because for us, the ability to drive large audiences into an experience and work with all of our partners to drive consumption of their properties that they’re spending a lot of money on, the value proposition for us is the health of that ecosystem.”

That philosophy has seemingly worked; not only does Roku continue to dominate in terms of device sales and streaming users, but the Roku Channel is
steadily climbing in the Nielsen ratings
as well. The platform is the highest-rated no-cost streaming service outside of YouTube, and is besting popular subscription streamers like
Max
,
Paramount+
, and
Peacock
.

But from a sports perspective, while Franzetta wouldn’t divulge specific viewership numbers, he said that Roku, and presumably Major League Baseball, are pleased with the results of Sunday Leadoff’s move to the platform.

“We were very happy with last year, and we’re up year over year, and we’re continuing to see that trend,” he said. “I can’t speak for MLB, but I imagine that they’re happy with the results. And again, it’s about that overall awareness, that overall reach, individual game performance, the performance of the advertising units, the performance of the sponsorship opportunities. So all of those things add up and we’re very happy with it.”

Despite the fact that streaming has been an integral part of our entertainment diet for the better part of two decades, the landscape is still incredibly volatile, thanks to the fact that traditional linear TV is eroding at alarming rates. While that has countless impacts on how individuals access their favorite content, from a sports perspective, perhaps the most notable is that it can now be incredibly difficult to figure out where to watch the teams and games that you are most interested in.

Starting this fall, the
NBA
will kick off
new 11-year contracts
with a trio of media partners;
ESPN
will be the only carryover from the previous agreements. As the league renews its relationship with
NBC
and begins streaming on
Prime Video
, Franzetta believes this disruption in fans’ viewing habits is the perfect example of why Roku is so valuable to consumers.

“In many instances, what used to be one or two partners is now three, four, or five partners. That creates friction for users,” he said. “And it’s important from our perspective to make that as much of an always-on and personalized experience as possible. So, with the NBA, we have a great partnership with them and … those new partners are on our platform and integrated into our sports experience already. So
Peacock
and
Prime
are both integrated into our sports experience, and now they’ll be integrated into the NBA portion of that experience.”

Consolidation and aggregation have long been the focus of many streaming executives, and while Roku has engaged in
its own efforts towards consolidation
, it is clear that the already dominant platform is aiming to become as useful and ubiquitous for cord-cutting sports fans as the cable package was a generation ago.

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is a free
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that provides 350+ live linear streaming channels and more than 80,000 free movies and TV shows. The library contains entertainment from several different decades, including some major hits.

…

The service also made a splash with the acquisition of the Quibi library, now presented as Roku Originals. More original content is set to follow.

Users can add premium subscriptions to services like Paramount+, Showtime, STARZ, discovery+, and AMC+ that can be accessed within the Roku Channel ecosystem.

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