Good news for Roku users (or at least Roku users desperate for a taste of that delicious Real criminal ghosts): The streaming hardware company has announced that for once you don’t have to wait months for licensing deals to access the sheer abundance of content (?) available through brand-new, but also-kind-of-brand-old streaming service Paramount Plus on the company’s boxes. On the contrary, the renamed CBS All Access will be available on the first day of availability, and also for many negative first days before that because, again, this is pretty much just the old CBS All Access with a ton of new labels pasted all over.
Either way, it’s good news anyway, considering how often the most convenient streaming hardware company gets into a fight with the big streamers about whether or not to carry their content. The arguments about Roku carriage, unsurprisingly, almost always come down to the last detail: The basic principle of the company is that, since the hardware allows streamers to more effectively attract consumers – usually on services that provide the streamers with subscription income, or ad revenue – that it deserves a cut in that profit. This was a persistent bottleneck with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, for example because Peacock operates on the basis of a proprietary ad model and NBC was not interested in relinquishing any of its ads load to a third party, no matter how useful the boxes areThey finally got it together in September last year. HBO Max was equally slow to get on board, though those issues were finally ironed out in December.
Paramount Plus, meanwhile, presumably supports the deals already closed for CBS All Access, a process that was presumably involved all involved did a quick search and replace name to exchange the new name for the old one on the existing contracts. Still, it’s good news if you want to watch Real world or SpongeBob, or do you just want to continue playing the absurd game of streaming service Pokémon we’re all stuck in it now and are desperate for an easy place catch all of them