In a February earnings call, Roku CEO Anthony Wood said that he thinks the new home screen, which was in testing at the time, would “increase monetization over time, whether that’s getting viewers to sign up for subscriptions or watch more ad-supported content.”
Other changes
The new Roku OS home screen also has a slimmer left sidebar menu with images replacing text. In the center are tiles for “Top Picks for You” above rows of tiles for “Quick Access.” The former, per Roku’s announcement, is a “personalized row that makes recommendations and highlights trending and relevant content based on your interest,” where “no two people will see the same mix.” Quick Access, meanwhile, uses AI to show users’ “most-used apps and shortcuts.”
“One of the things we found is that not very many people actually customized those app screens,” Smalley told Fast Company. “They’d end up scrolling all the way to the bottom of this long list. So, what we wanted to do was actually pull that all together in a way that made sense for you.”
Other changes include the addition of a section called Destinations, which Roku said are “curated hubs [that] span genres and moods,” such as comedies, sports, and movies, with content across different streaming services.
However, some users are perturbed by the new home screen.
“I don’t want recommendations! I know what I want to watch. Plastering ads for shit you think I want to see is the fastest way to get me to not watch it. This is going to suck,” an apparent Roku user going by Kruse on Reddit posted today.
One feature that could be useful but that’s not included in the update would be an easy way to select recently viewed content from across apps on the home screen, so you can quickly get back to watching. Instead, Roku’s home screen update seems more geared toward recommending new stuff and using AI, rather than just recent history, to try to guess at what you might want to watch.
Roku TVs and streaming devices in the US will start seeing the new home screen today. “The update will arrive automatically,” Roku noted.