The 2024 Paris Olympics mark perhaps the biggest step in Roku’s sports zone strategy to date. The streaming company has partnered with U.S. English-language Olympics broadcaster NBC for an “NBC Olympic Zone” home screen destination hub, which has everything from listings of live and upcoming events and primetime coverage and ways to watch them to on-demand highlights, medal counts, athlete profiles, and more.
The zone will feature a wide variety of ways to watch the Olympics. That will include through NBCUniversal streaming service Peacock, which is streaming all events live. But it will also link to options through virtual multichannel programming distributors (such as Fubo, YouTube TV, and so on) for coverage on NBC, USA, and so on. And Roku will be working with NBC throughout the Games on what particular coverage and athletes to spotlight.
This Olympic Zone follows similar zones Roku has done for sports in general as well as specific leagues (including the NFL, the NBA, and MLB). But this one stands out on a few levels. It’s for a massive global event, it’s for an event where an off-heard complaint is “I don’t know what’s on or how to find it,” and it’s in close partnership with a particular broadcaster.
Recently, Roku director of product for sports Drew Adams spoke to AA on the NBC Olympic Zone and how it fits into their overall sports strategy, saying this grew out of that first centralized Sports Zone they launched in November 2022 , but it stands out for potentially reaching an audience even beyond traditional sports fans.
“We understood that sports were continuing to fragment week by week, month, month by month, with different rights holders coming into play or leagues with different distribution points,” he said. “So when we evaluated where Roku could add value here, that was one area where we said ‘Well, we can really help, right? We can help the user here by making it easy for them to find sports content all in one place.’
“And since that time, we’ve continued to evolve that experience where we’ve got zones for dedicated leagues. We’ve worked with the NFL. We worked with MLB and the NBA to have these specific zones. And the Olympics presents a great opportunity to kind of extend that into what is this cultural event happening once every every two years between Summer and Winter Olympics.
Adams said Roku sees value to this zone for diehard sports fans, but they also hope it can reach those who see the Games as a cultural event beyond just sports.
“It’s to have a dedicated place for not just sports fans, because I think the Olympics attracts even a broader audience, so for users of Roku, when they come on to our platform, to have a dedicated destination to to consume Olympic content from our partners and from the sponsors that are helping support the destination,” he said.
“It’s going to be filled with not only live content, but ancillary content such as highlights and what have you. So it’s going to be an awesome single point of discovery for people on Roku to find everything that they’re looking for around around the Olympics.”
On the specifics of this zone, Adams said part of its goal is to make it easy to find all the coverage of a particular sport a viewer might be interested in.
“There’s a ton of content that’s going to flow into the zone,” he continued. “We’re going to have basically full coverage of the Olympic content catalog within this destination. There’s ways that we’re curating content that should make the journey a little bit easier.
“We’re going to do a sport-level discovery, so if you’re passionate around an Olympic sport, even if it’s a long-tail sport, you could come and find know events or content related to that sport directly. So that’s one way to just kind of cut through some of the optionality, to look on a sport level.”
Adams said another thing that stands out with this zone is the way they’re working with NBC on specific athletes and stories to feature prominently. And he said it’s important that that will be a discussion during the Games based on what happens, not just a pre-arranged list of who to spotlight (an approach that often can go wrong during the Olympics due to upsets and breakout stars).
“Another really cool part about this execution is we’ve worked really closely with NBC. And part of what we’re doing with them is we have an open line of communication where they’re going to help feed us relevant topics and events,” Adams said. “With the Olympics, who knows how that will unfold and what athlete will come to be the Cinderella story?
“So we’re going to have an open line of communication with them where they’ll work with our merchandising team, who has the ability to say ‘This athlete has got an upcoming event, and we can actually take that, we can pin that content to a prominent point of discovery, so it doesn’t get lost within the mix of just a chronological ordering.’
“‘Let’s say, ‘Hey, you know, this is a medal event for an athlete that’s become a sensation around the Olympics. Let’s make sure this is front and center.'”
He feels that combination of sorting ability and curation should make the zone appealing both for Olympics viewers who already know what sport they want to focus on and those who are just looking for key stories.
“Between some of the automated functionality we have in place with the sport-level sorting and then our ability to work with NBC to kind of have that pulse on what people are interested in and what are the breaking events and stories, the combination of those two things should help us refine what folks can find in an easy way,” he said.
Adams said this Olympic Zone also gives Roku ability to introduce their discovery features to some of their audience that may not know of them, which might promote further engagement with the overall Sports Zone and the zones they’ve launched for specific leagues.
“One, it gives us an opportunity to to introduce what we have to a broader audience, right? I mean, our scale is tremendous, 80-million-plus active accounts on a monthly basis. They all engage with Roku in a different way,” he said.
“Some of them come in through our platform touch points, others just say, ‘Hey, I want to come in. I just want to launch an app directly.’ And, you know, that’s their journey when they come on to Roku. So having a destination like this just gives us an opportunity to kind of showcase some of the value that we think we bring to the table from a discovery perspective.”
“And the hope is that our fans that are using our sports zone on a monthly basis today continue to use that to find the Olympic content, and then for users that aren’t as familiar with some of these destinations that we’re speaking about are drawn to them by the fact that we’re going to have house Olympic content there. And the hope is they come and they say, ‘Hey, this was great, it made my streaming a lot easier, there’s value in this.'”
And he said that hopefully carries on into further engagement with Roku’s overall Sports Zone and other zones.
“When the Olympics are over, this sports destination is going to persist. So then the hope is they come back,” he said. “A couple weeks after the Olympics, the NFL starts, and we’ll have the NFL zone. So it’s hopefully a good way for us to attract and retain a new audience and have them come back and enjoy what we’re doing year-round and not just for a couple weeks around the Olympics.”
Adams said it’s vital to Roku’s sports strategy to position themselves as a hub to help ease the sports streaming experience, because he feels that’s becoming more complicated for many with the way rights deals are going.
“I think it’s key because the macro trend is pulling things in the opposite direction where it’s just hard to find things,” Adams said. “With the Olympics from a content distribution rights perspective, NBCU is the rightsholder, so it’s a bit more siloed in terms of optionality for watching. But there will still be within our sports discovery experience multiple ways to watch, because we have our vMVPD options included as well.”
He said Roku can stand out by helping users cut through the noise to find the programming they want.
“It really comes down to simplifying the streaming journey, right? It’s being complicated by lots of factors. And at the end of the day we want people to be able to look to Roku as just an easy way to stream sports content.”
Adams said Roku has an across-the-board approach focused on helping users find streaming content. But he thinks that’s particularly vital in sports with that rights fragmentation.
“It fits with our overall ethos of just being a streaming-first, easy-to-use platform. And we want that same thinking to triple down into sports as well.
“You shouldn’t have to come and spend your time searching for content, especially from a sports perspective. We want to make sure we’re presenting you with the right stuff at the right time and and just making it easy for you to ultimately get get to where you’re trying to be, and that’s streaming sports.”
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