Launching a FAST channel on Roku
Roku is two things at once, and confusing them wastes months. There is The Roku Channel, a curated FAST service that carries linear channels under a distribution deal — and there is the Roku platform, where anyone can publish their own app. They lead to different businesses.
Door one: a channel inside The Roku Channel
This is the FAST play. The Roku Channel is one of the largest free streaming services in the US — consistently around 3% of total US television viewing — and a linear channel carried inside it appears in a guide alongside everything else Roku programmes.
It works like every other platform deal: negotiated carriage, a revenue share against advertising, and selection on Roku's terms. You are pitching for a slot, and the competition is every other channel owner doing the same. The upside is that the audience is already there and already watching.
Door two: publishing your own app
Roku also lets you build and publish a channel app to its store. This is genuinely open — no negotiation, published documentation, defined delivery specifications — and it is a completely different proposition commercially. You own the relationship and the advertising, and you also own the entire burden of getting anyone to install it.
For a brand with an existing audience to direct, that can be right. For a new channel hoping to be discovered, it usually is not: a store listing nobody searches for is not distribution. The reason FAST works is that the viewer never had to choose to install anything.
Which one you actually want
- Want reach you don't have to buy? That is The Roku Channel, and it means a distribution conversation with an outcome you don't control.
- Have an audience you can already reach? Your own app gives you the economics and the data, and Roku's published specs mean you can start building today.
- Doing both? Common, and the order matters — a channel with carriage somewhere is a much easier pitch everywhere else.
Roku publishes its media delivery specifications openly, which is unusual among these platforms and useful even if you end up going the carriage route: it tells you what a large platform considers acceptable before you have signed anything.
The part that is the same either way
Whichever door you go through, a linear channel needs a continuous schedule, conforming files, declared ad breaks and guide data. None of that changes based on the commercial arrangement, and all of it is the operational problem that decides whether the channel is still running in a year.
Where MediaBlaze fits
MediaBlaze produces the material that fills those hours — wire video or your own footage turned into finished, ad-marked packages with script and voiceover, approved by an editor and delivered to whichever playout partner originates your channel. It does not sell you distribution and does not licence you content.