Paid streaming for cheapskates is having a moment | The Verge

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Paid streaming for cheapskates is having a moment

Roku’s $3 Howdy service is growing its catalog, with plans to expand to other platforms and countries.

Roku’s $3 Howdy service is growing its catalog, with plans to expand to other platforms and countries.

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Roku’s Howdy offers ad-free streaming for $2.99 a month.

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Streaming is getting expensive: This week, Amazon Prime Video became the latest streaming service to increase prices. In addition to the annual

Those price increases don’t go unnoticed. About half of US consumers think they’re paying too much for streaming, and two out of three people who canceled a service in recent months say they did so because it was too expensive.

Roku CEO Anthony Wood told the audience of an investor conference earlier this month that he has been closely involved in getting Howdy off the ground. “I personally think it’s going to be a huge business for us,” he said.

With inflation picking up again, an aggressively priced streaming service for budget-conscious consumers does look like an intriguing bet. And with Roku now looking to bring Howdy to other platforms, cheap streaming may just be having a moment in 2026.

First things first: Howdy is not directly competing with Netflix, HBO Max, or any of the other premium services. You won’t find any new TV shows or expensively produced original dramas on the service. Instead, its catalog is mostly made up of older titles. Think Sleepless in Seattle, the first Paddington movie, or largely forgotten series like The Michael J. Fox Show.

“This is a lot of catalog content,” says Parks Associates entertainment research director Michael Goodman, using industry shorthand for titles making up Hollywood’s back catalogs

While Howdy’s initial catalog didn’t exactly live up to its promise of offering “almost everything you want to watch,” Roku has been steadily expanding its library: Just this week, the company announced new deals with Sony Pictures and Disney, as well as an extended partnership with Warner Bros., to beef up Howdy’s catalog.

There’s also a fair bit of overlap between Howdy and Roku’s free streaming efforts: Many of Howdy’s titles are also available for free, with ads, on the company’s Roku Channel.

The Roku Channel has been a massive success story for the company, with usage now surpassing that of Netflix among Roku households. Except not everyone wants to watch advertising. And even if you’re okay with the occasional ad break during a TV show, you might want to keep your movie nights ad-free.

“There is not one business model that fits everybody,” says Goodman. Adding ad-free streaming to its portfolio is a smart move for Roku, he argues. “You need to have multiple platforms to reach the consumer.”

Roku arguably has a long history of being able to reach budget-conscious consumers. The company never positioned its

With plans to be in 100 million households globally this year, Roku also has a built-in advantage when it comes to marketing Howdy. Search for a movie like A Star Is Born on Roku, and the platform will automatically suggest subscribing to Howdy for

Soon, you might be able to watch the Cooper-Gaga flick on platforms like Google TV with Howdy as well: Roku plans to bring the budget streaming service to third-party devices this year. “To become the scale of business I think it can be, it needs to be everywhere all major streaming services are,” Wood said about Howdy this month. “It needs to be international, [in] different countries. It needs to be off platform. It needs to be everywhere.”

If Howdy catches on, other free streamers may follow with their own paid plans, predicts Goodman. “There is potential for this to expand to other services.”

In fact, one could argue that one company has already embraced ad-free budget streaming: You Tube began offering its Premium Lite plan, which offers ad-free viewing of “most videos” for

The big question is whether Roku can grow Howdy while keeping content licensing costs low enough to actually make a profit with it. “Subscription growth at any cost — that’s not the model today,” says Goodman, alluding to the billions of dollars the industry poured into streaming a few years ago.

When services like Apple TV Plus and Peacock launched in 2019 and 2020, respectively, they bet on undercutting Netflix with deeply discounted subscription plans — only to double the costs of those plans in the following years.

Could the same eventually happen to Howdy subscribers? Goodman thinks so. “Over time, the price will rise,” he says.

Janko Roettgers Close Janko Roettgers Lowpass author, Verge contributor Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. Follow Follow See All by Janko Roettgers

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