Skip to main content

Roku adds NFL Zone to its software, and not a moment too soon

A handout image showing NFL Zone on a Roku TV.
Handout / Roku

With the Week 1 games now in the books, Roku today announced that it’s added an NFL Zone within the Sports section of its user interface.

The specialized area, which is available on Roku players and on Roku TVs, gives football fans “a centralized location to find live and upcoming games, so they can spend less time figuring out where to watch the game and more time rooting for their favorite teams..”

The NFL Zone is available in the main sports section of the Roku home screen menu, and you also can access it through Roku’s search function.

“Last year we introduced the Sports experience for our highly engaged sports audience, making it simpler for Roku users to watch sports programming,” Gidon Katz, President of Consumer Experience at Roku, said in a press release. “As we start the biggest sports season of the year, providing easy access to NFL games and content to our millions of users is a top priority for us. We look forward to fans immersing themselves within the NFL Zone and making it their destination to find NFL games.”

In addition to showing you which lives are live and which are coming up, NFL Zone also shows previews of weekly matchups, highlights, and gives you direct access to Roku’s NFL channel. (Roku calls apps “Channels.”)

One thing to note, however, is that while the NFL Zone will show you all sorts of things about live and upcoming games, you’ll still need a method by which to watch them, such as cable or streaming, or via NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube or YouTube TV.

“We are excited to partner with Roku to increase discoverability of NFL programming to football fans,” Hans Schroeder, NFL Executive Vice President of Media Distribution, said in the press release. “With the launch of the NFL Zone, Roku users can easily find the games they want to watch, from one place. We are thrilled to provide our fans with an excellent option to follow their favorite teams all season long.”

Editors' Recommendations

Phil Nickinson
Section Editor, Audio/Video
Phil spent the 2000s making newspapers with the Pensacola (Fla.) News Journal, the 2010s with Android Central and then the…
Google TV gives NFL Sunday Ticket top billing, adds FAST channels
Google TV free channels.

Google announced today that all Android TV and Google TV devices in the U.S. are getting more than 25 new free channels, baked right into the operating systems' Live tabs. That brings the total number of built-in FAST channels to more than 100, meaning that you'll be able to watch all kinds of free content without having to download a single thing. It's all built in.

FAST channels refer to free, ad-supported television and can be individual shows or entire channels of content. Google didn't immediately name the 25-plus channels, but said they include the BBC and Lionsgate. (You can see a big list of them here.) And that's on top of the others that were added in the spring, which brings a ridiculous 800 or so channels (more or less) to the platform. Whether they have what you want to watch? That's completely up to you. But it's free.

Read more
NFL Sunday Ticket adds chat, key plays, Shorts, cost-splitting
NFL Sunday Ticket graphic.

If you've been weighing whether to get NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube or YouTube TV but just couldn't quite stomach the $300-plus cost, you now have the option to split the cost over three months.

The exact NFL Sunday Ticket price that you pay will vary slightly depending on whether you're subscribing via YouTube TV or YouTube proper, and whether you're including NFL RedZone. So that's $349 on the low end and $489 on the upper end.

Read more
Verizon is giving away NFL Sunday Ticket for free
NFL Sunday Ticket info for YouTube TV as seen on a phone.

Verizon announced today that it's giving new and existing customers the opportunity to get NFL Sunday Ticket for free. Yes, there are some details, but the bottom line is a whole bunch of folks are going to be able to watch out-of-market NFL games this year on YouTube or YouTube TV, and not pay an extra cent for it. (And some will at least get a $100 discount.)

The deal will be available starting July 27.

Read more