Inside Roku’s Big Bet on Sports

Roku is all in on sports.

The technology company in millions of homes across the country has expanded recently into more sports programming, producing Sunday morning MLB games on The Roku Channel for the first time this season. And even when it doesn’t have the rights, Roku still wants to create shoulder programming and prioritize sports content on its partner platforms, the company’s president of media, Charlie Collier, said Tuesday at the Front Office Sports Tuned In event in New York.

“The whole notion of having not just the game from Major League Baseball, but the opportunity to curate a fan’s experience and have a destination that makes it easier for them, and have a fast service, it really is a very modern way of solving the baseball fragmentation problem,” Collier said.

Collier emphasized that Roku wants to make it easier for fans to find games as rights continue to splinter. He called helping partner platforms get more viewers and subscribers “a great joy,” saying the company promoted the Olympics as if it actually had the rights to air them. The company is also homing in on its own content, with Collier saying Roku’s MLB coverage is “only going to grow.”

But Collier also warned against unrestricted growth, saying he thinks consolidation is coming for the industry.

“I think it has been a pretty profound shift to watch the ‘growth at all costs’ [mentality] … shift to finding profitability,” Collier said. “And for a while there our industry forgot that growth is not an unequivocal good.”