The Roku Channel is giving your kids more of what they love. The streaming service announced the addition of “Sesame Street” short videos to its Kids and Family section. The new offering will feature Elmo, Big Bird, Abby and the rest of the beloved characters free of charge. Users who are subscribed to HBO via Premium Subscriptions on The Roku Channel can also watch full episodes of the classic show.
In addition to adding “Sesame Street” videos, Roku also announced they created new content categories within the Kids and Family section. Users can now find content based on themes. Simply enter keywords, such as “cars,” “trains,” “jungle” or “challenges,” and a host of collections for that theme will come up.
Roku launched the Kids and Family section last August, with 7,000 free, ad-supported movies and TV episodes. The content came from 20 launch partners, including Lionsgate, Hasbro and Mattel with franchises like “Care Bears,” “The Cat in the Hat,” “Leapfrog,” “Little Baby Bum,” “My Little Pony,” “Rev & Roll,” “Super Mario Brothers” and “Thomas & Friends.” Roku also partnered with pocket.watch for exclusive 22-minute episodes of “Ryan’s World.”
As part of their Q3 2019 financial results, Roku announced back in November that they now have 32.3 million active accounts. This is after the company added 1.7 million in the second quarter and more than 8.5 million since the third quarter last year. With more users streaming even more, streaming hours increased from 6.2 billion to 10.3 billion (+66%) over the last year.