Good news for Roku users (or at least Roku users desperate to taste those delicious Real Criminal Minds): The streaming hardware company announced that, for the first time, you won’t have to wait months for licensing agreements to be closed to access the vast abundance of content (?) available at brand new streaming service, but also old, Paramount Plus in the company’s boxes. Instead, the brand new CBS All Access will be available on the first day of its availability, and also for many negative first days before that because, again, this is basically the old CBS All Access with a lot of new labels stuck everywhere.
Anyway: it’s good news anyway, given the frequency with which the most convenient streaming hardware company gets into fights with the main streamers over whether or not to take their content. The arguments about the Roku carriage, unsurprisingly, it almost always comes even money: The basic principle of the company is that, since its hardware allows streamers to connect more effectively to consumers, typically services that provide the referred streamers with subscription revenue, or ad revenue – that deserves a share of those profits. This was a point of persistent disagreement with NBCUniversal’s Peacock, for example, because Peacock operates from a proprietary ad serving model, and NBC was not interested in giving away any of its ads carry to a third party, no matter how useful their boxes are. (They finally met in September last year.) HBO Max was also slow to board, although these problems were resolved in December.
Paramount Plus, for its part, is probably hitchhiking on the negotiations already in place for CBS All Access, a process that presumably involved all involved doing a quick find and replacement to replace the new name with the old one in existing contracts. Still, it’s good news if you want to watch Real world, or Sponge Bob, or simply want to continue playing the absurd game from the streaming service Pokémon we are all stuck in, and are desperate to have an easy place to take all of them.