Placeholder Products
What Roku’s Howdy and Fox One tell us about the future of direct-to-consumer streaming
Two new streaming services were announced this week.
Neither is built to win.
Neither is designed to grow.
Neither is really meant for you.
Howdy
Roku’s new service is called Howdy.
$2.99/month. No ads. No originals. Just a lightly repackaged catalog of movies and TV shows you’ve already seen on Tubi, Pluto, and The Roku Channel.
The price is the pitch. But it’s also the ceiling.
At $2.99:
– No room for originals
– No differentiation from free AVOD services
– No margin to scale or experiment
This isn’t a product built to compete. It’s a product built to exist.
Something Roku can point to in a bundle. Or license out. Or mention on an earnings call.
It’s the same playbook we’ve already seen — just reversed.
Amazon took an ad-free experience (Prime Video), added ads, then offered to remove them again for $2.99/month.
Roku took a free, ad-supported experience (The Roku Channel), removed the ads, and called that a product — also for $2.99/month.
Same end: pay to avoid interruptions.
But Prime Video is bundled, global, and full of exclusives.
Howdy is none of those things.
Fox One
Then there’s Fox.
Their new service, Fox One, launches August 21. It’s a single app that gives you access to Fox News, Fox Sports, Fox Entertainment, B1G, and Fox Weather.
The price:
– $19.99/month or $199/year
– $24.99/month with Fox Nation bundled
It’s being framed as “direct-to-consumer,” but nothing about the offer is direct.
There are no streaming exclusives. No personalization. No native product features. No live interaction. Just a clean pipe from Fox to viewers, for people who don’t have cable.
This is the same linear feed Fox already distributes — just routed through a new app.
The structure hasn’t changed. The economics haven’t changed.
Only the delivery mechanism has.
You’re paying full freight for what used to come bundled.
And Fox gets to call it streaming.
What They Have in Common
These aren’t consumer plays.
They’re positioning plays.
Roku launches a low-stakes paid product with no upside — not to build a subscriber base, but to have a SKU ready for bundling, licensing, or white-label distribution.
Fox launches a high-price streaming portal that’s intentionally bland — not to build loyalty, but to create a controlled exit for cable viewers who might otherwise churn into someone else’s platform.
Neither is about competing for attention.
Neither builds identity, habit, or daily use.
Neither creates new behavior.
But that’s the point.
They don’t want to trigger behavior change.
They want to stall it.
These are products designed to buy time. To show optionality.
They’re for partners, not audiences.
Because in both cases, the product isn’t the product.
The product is the infrastructure they still want to control.