Entertainment Weekend: New Roku Sports Channel Brings Viewers 24/7 Access to Premium Sports Programming

The Roku Sports Channel is a new, free ad-supported channel that consolidates Roku’s premium sports content into a single, easy-to-access, lean-back experience for sports enthusiasts. It debuted on August 12 on America’s top-ranked TV streaming platform.

Roku Sports Channel will feature a wide breadth of popular sports programming that Roku owns and licenses. Featured content will include live Major League Baseball games with MLB Sunday Leadoff, Emmy-nominated talk show “The Rich Eisen Show,” “GMFB: Overtime,” live races from Formula E, and sports-themed Roku Originals produced with some of the most popular leagues in professional sports, including “NFL Draft: The Pick Is In,” “WWE: Next Gen,” and “Fight Inc: Inside the UFC.” The channel will also include exclusive partner content, like classic boxing matches from Top Rank, combat sports from Swerve Sports, and high-stakes poker entertainment from PokerGO featuring the game’s most popular players.

“A curated always-on channel that leads our viewer through the wide variety of premium sports content available for free on The Roku Channel, Roku Sports Channel is an exciting addition to our expanding sports offering,” said Joe Franzetta, Head of Sports, Roku Media. “We continue to see audiences enjoy the familiar, lean-back experience FAST offers, especially with sports. Sports is one of our most popular channel genres on The Roku Channel, which makes us so excited to make it even easier for audiences to jump into Roku’s standout programming.”

Roku will continue to refresh and expand Roku Sports Channel with new and upcoming exclusive programming, including NBA G-League games and the Roku Original WNBA documentary “Renee Montgomery: A Radical Act.” Roku Sports Channel is available on The Roku Channel in the U.S. Streamers can access it through The Roku Channel’s Live TV Guide.

The Roku Channel is available to stream for free, no subscription or sign-up required. Viewers can watch it on Roku devices or TVs, TheRokuChannel.com and through the Roku app on iOS and Android devices, Amazon Fire TVs, Samsung TVs and Google TVs, and other Android TV OS devices.

*By hours streamed (Hypothesis Group: Q4 2023)

Jim Williams is the Washington Bureau Chief, Digital Director as well as the Director of Special Projects for Genesis Communications. He is starting his third year as part of the team. This is Williams 40th year in the media business, and in that time he has served in a number of capacities. He is a seven time Emmy Award winning television producer, director, writer and executive. He has developed four regional sports networks, directed over 2,000 live sporting events including basketball, football, baseball hockey, soccer and even polo to name a few sports. Major events include three Olympic Games, two World Cups, two World Series, six NBA Playoffs, four Stanley Cup Playoffs, four NCAA Men’s National Basketball Championship Tournaments (March Madness), two Super Bowl and over a dozen college bowl games. On the entertainment side Williams was involved s and directed over 500 concerts for Showtime, Pay Per View and MTV Networks.