In August, Roku added six more free live channels to its Roku Channel (aff), a week after adding four others. Both batches landed on a service that already carried more than 500 free live TV channels, and if you own a Roku, neither arrival will have announced itself to you. New channels just appear in the Live TV Guide, somewhere among the hundreds already sitting there. Roku has spent five years building one of the largest free lineups in US streaming, and seemingly less time working out how anyone is meant to navigate it.
The Roku Channel added around 80 free channels in six months
But the number you actually watch hasn't moved much
When Roku launched the Live TV Guide in 2020, it carried a little over 100 channels, but by 2023, the company was quoting 350-plus. It passed 500 in early 2025, and it has kept climbing since, with roughly 80 new free channels arriving in the first half of 2026 alone: more than 30 between June and July, 15 in May, and another 30 in April.
That is a genuinely impressive acquisition rate, and on paper, it's good news for anyone tired of streaming price hikes. In practice, though, the growth has run well ahead of the watching habits.
TiVo's Q4 2025 Video Trends Report, published in June and based on data from 4,493 adults across the US and Canada, found that the average FAST user (aka free ad-supported streaming television) watches…