Roku’s Live TV Zone Brings Cable’s Mindless Scroll to Cord-Cutting

Roku right this moment launched a Live TV Zone as a launchpad for your entire reside and in-progress streaming content material. If you utilize Roku’s Live TV Channel Guide or subscribe to streaming apps like YouTube TV, Hulu with Live TV, or Sling TV, you’ll have the ability to entry reside choices immediately from the Live TV Zone.

Turn in your Roku TV or streaming gadget to get to the Live TV Zone. On the left-hand navigation menu, scroll right down to the Live TV possibility. You also can seek for the Live TV Zone. Once you’re there, you’ll see a linear timeline, just like the TV information of yesteryear, that then means that you can mindlessly scroll by means of the tons of of choices and nonetheless really feel slightly overwhelmed by all of it.

In a publish announcing the brand new function, Roku says it added the brand new reside TV information partly as a result of persons are nonetheless utilizing their TVs on this approach. Roku cites a latest streaming survey (PDF hyperlink) that exposed that 61% of customers with out conventional cable TV nonetheless watch reside broadcasting a number of occasions every week.

This harkening again to the TV expertise of yesteryear—OK, of solely just a few years in the past—has seen a resurgence on different streaming platforms. For occasion, Google TV has a Live tab that consolidates the channel listings from any app that helps it. On my Chromecast with Google TV, I scroll by means of my YouTube TV listings, after which it dumps me out into Pluto TV’s choices on the finish of the carousel. It makes it approach simpler for me to see what’s on, although I nonetheless don’t know what to observe by the point I attain the tip of the listing.

Amazon Fire TV additionally gives linear reside TV listings relying in your put in apps. Apple TV customers don’t but have this feature.

Roku’s Live TV Zone may seem to be a minor replace within the grand scheme of issues, but it surely’s a transfer geared toward preserving its platform as seamless as attainable. For customers, the interface is much like the normal expertise of pay-TV, which is able to assist ease the transition for brand new customers slicing the wire. It will even assist retain these new customers as Roku makes an attempt to take care of its streaming dominance.

Roku makes its cash from its platform, not the gadget or TV gross sales. Its income was trending upwards in its most recent filings, however there’s nonetheless a ton of competitors on this house, from ISPs like Comcast to smaller, tinkerer-friendly providers like Plex, which, like Roku, gives a lineup of free “live” content material. We additionally noticed how shortly issues may flip within the trade when one participant—let’s say, Google—decides to extend the stakes on its service choices (I’m speaking about YouTube TV, in fact).

But, merely, this new function make it simpler to make use of Roku, and that’s on the very least a great factor for customers.