Roku Reveals Big Change Coming to $3 Streaming Service

Earlier this week Roku founder, chairman and CEO Anthony Wood made a number of bold declarations and predictions at the Variety Entertainment Summit at CES.

Speaking on the subject of AI in entertainment, Wood predicted the first 100% AI-generated "hit movie" would debut - within the next three years.

“I have no idea if there’s an investment bubble, but I know that AI is going to be huge, and it already is,” Wood said, per Variety. “So it’s going to affect lots of different industries, but in our industry, it’s going to lower the cost of content production. I predict within the next three years, we’ll see the first 100% AI-generated hit movie, for example.”

Roku Reveals Big Update on $3 Streaming Service Howdy

Roku introduced Howdy, a new streaming service that costs users just $2.99 per month and offers ad-free viewing of over 3,000 titles, in August 2025. At a time when streaming platforms are raising prices and creating new ad content - despite viewers paying for the service - Wood knows Howdy is positioned well in the market.

“The opportunity for Howdy was, if you just look at what’s going on in the streaming world with streaming services, they’re getting more and more expensive,” Wood said. “They keep raising prices, and they keep adding larger and larger ad loads. So the part of the market where it actually started, low cost and no ads, is gone now. There’s no streaming services that addressed that portion of the market. That’s the opportunity for Howdy. It’s three bucks a month and no ads and it’s doing extremely well. Just like we built the Roku Channel using the promotional power of our platform, that’s what we’re doing with Howdy. We’re using that to grow it. But Howdy has very broad appeal. There’s lots of people in the world that want a $3-a-month streaming service with no ads."

Wood revealed the company intends to keep Howdy on the Roku platform for now, but will expand its business profile in the future. "So we’ll start on Roku, but we’ll also take it off platform as well. I think it’s going to be a really large business," he said.

When asked the clarify his comments, Wood told TechCrunch "the company has not yet said where, specifically, it plans to bring Howdy, but that 'we want to distribute it everywhere.'"

Related: Netflix Quietly Cancels 'Stranger Things' Creators' Next Show