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This is Lowpass by Janko Roettgers, a newsletter on the ever-evolving intersection of tech and entertainment, syndicated just for The Verge subscribers once a week.
Streaming is getting expensive: This week, Amazon Prime Video became the latest streaming service to increase prices. In addition to the annual $139 fee for Prime, consumers now have to pay $4.99 for ad-free viewing. The increase comes after Netflix, HBO Max, Disney Plus, and Discovery Plus all raised their prices in 2025.
Those price increases don’t go unnoticed. About half of US consumers think they’re paying too much for streaming, and two out of three people who canceled a service in recent months say they did so because it was too expensive.
Roku is betting that many of those consumers turned off by high streaming prices will sign up for the company’s Howdy service instead. Launched in August, Howdy offers more than 10,000 hours of movies and TV shows, ad-free, for just $2.99 a month.
Roku CEO Anthony Wood told the audience of an investor conference earlier this month that he has been closely involved in getting Howdy off the ground. “I personally think it’s going to be a huge business for us,” he said.
With inflation picking up again, an aggressively priced streaming service for budget-conscious consumers does look like an intriguing bet. And with Roku now looking to bring Howdy to other platforms, cheap streaming may just be having a moment in 2026.
First things first: Howdy is not directly competing with Netflix, HBO Max, or any of the other premium services. You won’t find any new TV shows or expensively produced original dramas on the service. Instead, its catalog is mostly made up of older titles. Think Sleepless in Seattle, the first Paddington movie, or largely forgotten series like The Michael J. Fox Show.
“This is a lot of catalog content,” says Parks Associates entertainment research director Michael Goodman, using industry shorthand for titles making up Hollywood’s back catalogs
While Howdy’s initial catalog didn’t exactly live up to its promise of offering “almost everything you want to watch,” Roku has been steadily expanding its library: Just this week, the company announced new deals with Sony Pictures and Disney, as well as an extended partnership with Warner Bros., to beef up Howdy’s catalog.
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