Roku Skipped Canada and Went Straight to Mexico — Here's Why That's the Whole Story

Roku Inc. launched Howdy in Mexico on Monday, bypassing the standard English-language expansion playbook and dropping its ad-free subscription video on demand (SVOD) service directly into a Spanish-language market at 39 pesos per month — roughly $1.90 in U.S. dollars.

The price is not introductory. It is not a trial. Netflix's cheapest plan in Mexico — with ads — runs 139 pesos per month. Howdy is ad-free at 39 pesos, less than a single song on iTunes. At that price point, Howdy is not competing with Netflix. It is competing with the decision to cancel.

The content stack at launch reflects a deliberate local bet. Lionsgate and Sony anchor the U.S. library side. TV Azteca — one of Mexico's dominant broadcast networks — contributes sports and entertainment from its own catalog, giving Howdy habitual-viewing inventory that purely licensed services cannot replicate.

Roku holds the No. 1 TV streaming platform position in Mexico by hours streamed, per Hypothesis Group data from December 2025, and says The Roku Channel ranks as a top-five app on the platform in the country. Howdy's Mexico launch now gives Roku a first-party SVOD product in all three markets where it claims the top position — a metric based on hours streamed, not subscriber count.

The timing follows a mobile expansion in late March that brought Howdy to iOS and Android for U.S. subscribers. Mexico subscribers get the mobile app at launch, not as a later addition.

Ecosystem builders compound. Roku just added a country.