For the last several years, Roku has sold a series of devices that you connect to your TV to stream a wide range of content from thousands of different apps. Roku is getting embedded directly into TVs that will go on sale in the coming months from consumer electronics manufacturers Hisense and TCL. At the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Roku announced partnerships with Hisense and TCL, both of which committed to building Roku-powered connected TVs. Those partnerships are now bearing fruit, with both CE makers announcing their lines of Roku TV products today.
For the last several years, Roku has made delightful little boxes that allow people to watch video streamed from the Internet on their televisions. Now the company is cutting out the middleman, working with Chinese manufacturers Hisense and TCL to sell Internet TVs powered by its software. Roku first said it was building televisions at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, and is showing them off publicly for the first time this week. They will be on sale this fall. The general look and feel will be familiar to anyone who’s used one of Roku’s boxes. Almost all of the 1,700 channels available through a standard Roku are also available on the TVs, with the exception of WatchESPN and Watch Disney. (Roku couldn’t reach a distribution deal with Disney for the new devices.) Smartphone apps allow people to pull up Netflix or YouTube videos on their phones and play them through the new TVs, so long as the devices are on the same wireless network.
