The Roku Channel last month expanded its free live TV lineup, adding over 20 new channels to its platform spanning sports, reality television, Spanish-language programming, comedy, and news. The rollout, reported by Cord Cutters News on May 30, 2026, and subsequently covered by Pocket-lint on June 1, 2026, brings the platform's total to over 500 free live TV channels available without a subscription. Two FIFA-branded channels headline a batch that also includes returning favourites from reality television and fresh content from digital-native creators.

What Roku added and when

According to Cord Cutters News, 19 channels were added to The Roku Channel in May 2026. Pocket-lint reported the figure as over 20 new free live TV channels for June 2026, with some overlap in the lists, suggesting a rolling addition pattern across the two months. The full combined list includes:

  • Alaska State Troopers
  • A&E Live PD Greatest Shifts
  • America's Got Talent Relive Last Season
  • ArtFlix
  • Astro Ciencia
  • Caracol Mix
  • Complex TV
  • FIFA Plus Women
  • FIFA Plus Espanol
  • Ink Masters Pluto
  • Lead Story Breaking News
  • Modern Wisdom
  • MTV En Espanol
  • Nomad Travel
  • Preston & Brianna
  • Property Brothers
  • Rawhide Pluto
  • Sports Illustrated
  • Stingray Hooked
  • Stokes Twins
  • The Beverly Hillbillies Pluto
  • The Prof G Channel
  • Tosh.o Pluto

The Cord Cutters News article, published by Luke Bouma, cited the addition date as May 2026 for the initial 19 channels, while Pocket-lint's Craig Donaldson noted that Roku was "adding over 20 new free live TV channels" to kick off June. The discrepancy in totals - 19 versus 20-plus - likely reflects the addition of a small number of channels such as Sports Illustrated and Stingray Hooked between the two publication dates.

FIFA channels and the World Cup connection

The two FIFA entries are arguably the most strategically notable additions in this batch. FIFA Plus Women and FIFA Plus Espanol arrive on The Roku Channel just as the 2026 FIFA World Cup draws global attention. The tournament is scheduled to take place across the United States, Canada, and Mexico, making North American streaming platforms a critical distribution point for football-related content.

FIFA Plus operates as a free, ad-supported streaming service run directly by FIFA. Adding dedicated channels for women's football and Spanish-language audiences to Roku's Live TV Guide positions both organisations to capture incremental viewership from cord-cutters who might otherwise miss associated content sitting outside the primary World Cup broadcast windows. Broadcast rights to the men's World Cup 2026 matches in the United States remain with Fox, and streaming access via major paid platforms continues to be the primary route for live match coverage. FIFA Plus channels, by contrast, carry supplementary and archival content, representing a different content tier within the same sporting moment.

The timing is deliberate. According to Cord Cutters News, Roku's channel additions reflect a strategic effort to balance popular mainstream entertainment with niche and culturally specific programming. The Spanish-language additions - FIFA Plus Espanol, Caracol Mix, and MTV En Espanol - suggest a targeted push toward Hispanic audiences at a moment when both streaming viewership data and World Cup excitement peak for that demographic.

Breaking down the content categories

Reality television and law enforcement

Reality television makes up a substantial share of the new additions. A&E Live PD Greatest Shifts compiles high-intensity footage from police operations, drawing from one of A&E's most-streamed franchises. Alaska State Troopers brings footage from remote patrols across one of the country's most geographically challenging law enforcement environments. According to Cord Cutters News, the channel showcases "law enforcement challenges in vast wilderness areas," appealing to audiences drawn to documentary-style unscripted content.

Property Brothers, the HGTV staple hosted by Drew and Jonathan Scott, arrives as a standalone channel offering continuous renovation and real estate content. America's Got Talent Relive Last Season gives the NBC competition franchise a dedicated live channel, recapping auditions and performances from the previous series run. The Preston & Brianna channel, aimed at younger viewers, and the Stokes Twins channel - built on the creators' YouTube following of digital-native fans - both reflect Roku's strategy of bridging traditional television formats with audiences who arrived via social platforms.

Comedy, classic TV, and tattoo competition

The comedy and nostalgia tier includes several Pluto-branded channels, indicating content sharing arrangements between Roku and Pluto TV, the Paramount-owned FAST service. Tosh.o Pluto delivers viral clip commentary in Daniel Tosh's format. The Beverly Hillbillies Pluto revives the 1960s CBS sitcom about a rural family relocated to Beverly Hills - a title that carries substantial syndication value given its episode count. Rawhide Pluto adds a further classic Western format to the lineup, while Ink Masters Pluto brings the tattooing competition series, which ran for 14 seasons on Paramount Network, to Roku viewers without a subscription.

News, lifestyle, and business

Lead Story Breaking News provides a dedicated national and international news feed. Modern Wisdom, the podcast-turned-channel hosted by Chris Williamson, covers productivity, philosophy, and contemporary culture, aligning with growing demand for long-form interview and discussion formats on streaming platforms. The Prof G Channel draws from Scott Galloway's business strategy and economics commentary, extending a podcasting and YouTube presence into live TV format. Nomad Travel rounds out the lifestyle tier with content aimed at location-independent workers and travel enthusiasts.

International and science programming

Astro Ciencia focuses on space and astronomical phenomena, making scientific content accessible without a subscription. ArtFlix documents the visual arts through exhibitions and artist profiles. Caracol Mix brings Colombian and Latin American television - including telenovelas, music, and variety programming - to Roku's Hispanic audience. The Stingray Hooked channel, from Canadian music and media company Stingray, focuses on fishing content, a niche with a loyal and consistent viewership base. Complex TV extends urban culture, fashion, music, and sneaker content from the Complex Networks brand, which has operated as a digital-first media company since transitioning away from print.

How the channels work within The Roku Channel

The new channels are accessible through The Roku Channel's Live TV Guide, which organises its 500-plus channels into genre-based categories visible along the left side of the screen. The guide is available on Roku-powered smart TVs and on standalone Roku streaming devices including the Roku Streaming Stick Plus and the Roku Ultra. According to Pocket-lint, users can also access the Live TV Guide directly from the Roku home screen via the Live TV tab.

Roku introduced a search function within the Live TV Guide - described by Pocket-lint as "recently introduced" - that allows users to type or use voice search to find channels by name. This is a practical navigational addition given the scale of the library. With over 500 channels, scrolling through the full guide to locate a newly added channel is time-consuming. The search function appears in the categories list on the left of the guide.

Users can favourite channels by selecting a channel and pressing the star button on their remote. Favourited channels appear in a dedicated Favourites category within the guide. This feature functions as a personal curation layer on top of a library that has grown too large for casual browsing to remain effective.

According to Pocket-lint, The Roku Channel app is also available on Samsung smart TVs and Amazon Fire TV devices, in addition to Android and iOS mobile platforms, extending the reach of the free channel library beyond Roku hardware.

The advertising context

For marketers and media buyers, each new channel that Roku adds to The Roku Channel represents incremental FAST advertising inventory. The Roku Channel operates on a free, ad-supported model - viewers pay nothing, and Roku generates revenue by serving ads against the content. Every additional channel, and every additional viewing hour that channel generates, expands the pool of available ad impressions.

The Roku Channel ranked second in ad-supported TV time in the United States as of December 2025, according to Nielsen data cited when Nielsen and Roku deepened their measurement partnership. Roku's platform as a whole accounted for more than 21% of all US television viewing in July 2025, surpassing broadcast television viewership for three consecutive months as of September 2025. By April 2026, Roku had reached 100 million streaming households globally, with the company reporting $1.25 billion in Q1 2026 platform revenue.

Against that backdrop, the addition of over 20 free channels is not simply a consumer product decision. It is a content supply move. More channels generate more viewing sessions. More viewing sessions generate more ad impressions. Programmatic buyers accessing Roku inventory through the Roku Exchange, launched in June 2024, or through the self-service Roku Ads Manager, launched in September 2024, ultimately bid against inventory that depends on The Roku Channel continuing to attract viewers. Content volume is part of how that audience is maintained and grown.

In April 2026, Roku launched Roku Curate, which combines Roku's first-party platform data with purchase signals from six retail partners into pre-packaged media buys. The effectiveness of that product depends in part on the scale and diversity of viewing behaviour across The Roku Channel. A wider channel lineup, serving more distinct audience segments - FIFA fans, Spanish-language viewers, business content consumers, reality TV audiences - produces richer behavioural signal than a narrower one.

FAST channel inventory across the industry has grown substantially. FAST channels experienced 42% growth according to figures cited in a December 2025 PPC Land report on Amazon Prime Video's free news hub, with 75% of connected TV advertising purchased programmatically according to IAB data. Lionsgate's decision in December 2025 to hand FreeWheel exclusive control of its FAST channel advertising across nearly 30 US channels illustrated how the commercial infrastructure around FAST was consolidating at the same time as channel counts expanded.

Roku's partnership with Vestel to expand its European presence through the Finlux brand, announced in September 2025, reflected the company's parallel push to replicate its US FAST inventory model internationally, where The Roku Channel's free content library plays a central role in hardware acquisition.

Scale and the free streaming market

The free streaming market has become increasingly competitive. According to Cord Cutters News, The Roku Channel is "one of the leading free ad-supported streaming television services," operating without subscription fees and appealing to cord-cutters and casual viewers. Comments in the Cord Cutters News article noted that FAST services collectively may carry close to 1,900 channels, with substantial overlap across platforms. One commenter estimated that Amazon's aggregated live guide carried over 1,500 entries alone. The volume creates a discovery challenge that platforms are addressing through search tools and curated categories.

Roku's Live TV Guide organises its 500-plus channels into navigable categories, and the recently introduced search function within the guide addresses the growing difficulty of finding specific channels by genre alone. Whether that navigational infrastructure scales effectively as the channel count approaches 600, 700, or beyond remains a practical question for users and for Roku's product teams alike.

What is clear from the May-June 2026 additions is that Roku is continuing to add channels at a pace of roughly 20 per month. Multiplied across a year, that pace implies the potential for hundreds of additional channels entering the Live TV Guide annually - a rate that changes the character of the service from a curated selection to something closer to a comprehensive free television aggregator.

Timeline

Summary

Who: Roku, Inc., operator of The Roku Channel - a free, ad-supported streaming television service available in the United States, Canada, Mexico, and the United Kingdom.

What: The addition of over 20 new free live TV channels to The Roku Channel's Live TV Guide across May and June 2026. The new channels span sports (FIFA Plus Women, FIFA Plus Espanol, Sports Illustrated), reality television (A&E Live PD Greatest Shifts, Alaska State Troopers, Property Brothers, America's Got Talent Relive Last Season), comedy and classic TV (Tosh.o Pluto, The Beverly Hillbillies Pluto, Rawhide Pluto, Ink Masters Pluto), news (Lead Story Breaking News), lifestyle and travel (Modern Wisdom, Nomad Travel, Stingray Hooked), business commentary (The Prof G Channel), international programming (Caracol Mix, MTV En Espanol, Astro Ciencia, ArtFlix, Complex TV), and creator-led content (Preston & Brianna, Stokes Twins).

When: The additions were reported on May 30, 2026 by Cord Cutters News (19 channels for May 2026) and on June 1, 2026 by Pocket-lint (over 20 channels for June 2026).

Where: The new channels are available within The Roku Channel's Live TV Guide on Roku smart TVs, Roku streaming devices including the Roku Streaming Stick Plus and Roku Ultra, Samsung smart TVs, Amazon Fire TV devices, and via The Roku Channel's Android and iOS apps.

Why: Roku expands its free content library to grow ad-supported viewing hours, generate more advertising inventory for programmatic buyers, and maintain its competitive position as the leading US streaming platform by hours viewed. The FIFA channel additions connect to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, capitalising on elevated global interest in football content. The Spanish-language inclusions reflect targeted outreach to Hispanic audiences. Each additional channel generates viewer engagement that underpins Roku's advertising revenue model - a model that produced $1.25 billion in Q1 2026 platform revenue alone.