Roku dropped four new channels into The Roku Channel and three of them are the usual archive filler: Mad TV, Whose Line Is It Anyway, Retro Black Laughs. The fourth is the story. Fairground AI sits at channel 300 and runs generative AI video around the clock, and the ad breaks are AI generated as well. As far as I can tell that makes it the first free, ad supported channel carrying nothing but machine made content.
The reception has been rough. Futurism and The Verge both took swings at it, and the complaint from people who have sat through a stretch is the same one I have with most AI video: the dialogue lands wrong, the cuts do not connect, and something odd is usually happening at the edge of frame. Fairground's CEO Colin Petrie-Norris is calling it a landmark for AI cinema. They will also take uploads from anyone and say they pay for what airs.
What interests me more than the quality argument is the legal one. Suno just lost a case over training on copyrighted material without permission. Fairground is monetising video that almost certainly came out of models trained the same way, and doing it on a living room platform with an ad ledger attached. That is a far easier target for a studio's lawyers than some research demo nobody makes money from.
For anyone with a Roku who has actually left it running: is the content drifting better week to week, or is 300 still the same loop it launched with?
The reception has been rough. Futurism and The Verge both took swings at it, and the complaint from people who have sat through a stretch is the same one I have with most AI video: the dialogue lands wrong, the cuts do not connect, and something odd is usually happening at the edge of frame. Fairground's CEO Colin Petrie-Norris is calling it a landmark for AI cinema. They will also take uploads from anyone and say they pay for what airs.
What interests me more than the quality argument is the legal one. Suno just lost a case over training on copyrighted material without permission. Fairground is monetising video that almost certainly came out of models trained the same way, and doing it on a living room platform with an ad ledger attached. That is a far easier target for a studio's lawyers than some research demo nobody makes money from.
For anyone with a Roku who has actually left it running: is the content drifting better week to week, or is 300 still the same loop it launched with?
