Discovery+ is being rolled into the Roku Channel, standalone app remains

Roku Ultra (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

Roku Channels is getting support for your discovery+ subscription.
Both the ad-free and ad-supported versions of discovery+ will be supported.

Roku is rolling the Discovery+ subscription offerings into its own Roku Channel. While Roku already offers a standalone discovery+ app via its store, this new move will mean that discovery+ content will also be available via the Roku Channel for the first time.

In a press release shared today, Roku says that viewers of the ad-supported ($4.99 per month) and premium ad-free ($6.99 per month) versions of Discovery+ will be supported via the Roku Channel across the United States. The Roku Channel already "offers Premium Subscriptions from over 50 services" the press release points out.

Discovery+ offers 70,000 episodes of current and classic shows from an iconic portfolio of networks, including HGTV, Food Network, TLC, ID, OWN, Travel Channel, Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and Magnolia Network, as well as more than 200 discovery+ original titles and hundreds of hours of exclusive content. Additionally, the service offers top non-fiction content from A&E, The HISTORY Channel, and Lifetime, as well as the definitive offering of nature and environmental programming, headlined by exclusive streaming access to the largest collection of natural history from the BBC.

"The launch of discovery+ on The Roku Channel makes it easy for our users to access this compelling content, while enabling Discovery to reach incremental audiences through The Roku Channel," Rob Holmes, Vice President, Programming, Roku, said via press release. "By offering more great content in The Roku Channel, we provide even more reasons for our millions of streamers to engage with a top five channel on our U.S. platform, and more opportunities for our partners to reach our large audience."

Roku Channel is far from the only way for people to bundle subscription services from multiple companies — both Amazon and Apple already do something similar via their own apps — but this is the best way for people to do it when using Roku hardware.

Roku makes some of the best streaming devices on the market, including some of the best devices for streaming Apple TV+, too.

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.