Roku improves sports curation and discovery as part of UX upgrade
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John Moulding
| 05 October 2023
1 Roku improves sports curation and discovery as part of UX upgrade

Roku has introduced a bunch of new features to improve content discovery and personalisation on the platform, including the ability to track live and upcoming sports that involve your favourite teams in one curated row. Sports highlights clips are also added.

The new features hit the U.S. within months and include more personalisation of the programme guide, better categorisation of content, more advanced controls on music playlists, and better integration of smart home services into the television UX.

The new features include:

The ability to track your favourite sports teams more easily. For the personalised sports feature, users add a team to the ‘My Favorites’ row within the Sports experience by clicking the ‘Favorite’ button on the game page – and then ‘tune in’ once it is game time.
Highlights within the Sports experience. Users will be able to watch clips from recent sporting events they either missed or want to relive.
The ability to personalise the order of channels in the live TV guide and remove channel numbers – something that has become more important now the platform offers 400+ free live linear channels.
New content categorisations to help users to their content faster. In the coming weeks, viewers will be able to browse by categories including ‘TV Shows’, ‘Movies’, ‘New & Popular’, and ‘Free’.
New experiences related to a specific genre or topic such as food or home are also coming.
Users are being given more control when watching one of the 250+ video playlists from Roku partners, including Stingray, Vevo, and Warner Music Group. You will be able to shuffle, skip ahead, and add video playlists to a ‘Save List’. Recommendations for similar playlists will be provided.
Expert Picture Setting arrive on 4K devices, so users can customise colour temperature, colour space, gamma correction and noise reduction directly from the TV. Expert picture settings are already available via the Roku Mobile app.
With all-new support for Roku Smart Home Video Doorbell events, users with a Camera subscription can now go back and see who was at their front door using the Cameras app on any Roku streaming players and Roku TV models.
Roku Cameras and Doorbell owners with a Camera subscription will now get instant notifications about an action on their Roku streaming players and Roku TV models. There is no need to pause a TV show to see if your package has arrived.

Roku has over 73 million active accounts globally. Roku OS 12.5 is rolling out to support Roku TV models and streaming players in the coming weeks.

“We’ve made it our priority to offer a platform that anticipates our user’s needs and adapts in real-time,” declares Preston Smalley, Vice President of Viewer Product at Roku. “With endless content to choose from and ways to watch, we will continue to innovate and release feature updates that better the viewing experience, making Roku the go-to destination for TV streaming.”