Technology

The appeal of Roku is that, whatever you happen to want to watch, there will almost certainly be a live channel for it. Just want to watch Little House on the Prairie? There’s a channel for it. Just want to watch Duck Dynasty? There’s a channel for that too. Purely want to watch nothing but local news from Wisconsin? Guess what: there’s a channel for that too.

But despite this wealth, a section of the population was still to see its needs fulfilled. What about people who hate plot and vision and the sight of people speaking convincing dialogue that synchronises perfectly with the movement of their lips? What about the people who just want to watch an unyielding torrent of eerily weightless nightmare fodder? Well, good news. Roku has finally caught up.

It was reported last week that Roku launched the Fairground AI Creator TV channel, the first free, all-AI streaming channel that pulls content from roughly 100 AI creators around the world. Early reactions were, to put it mildly, not great. The Verge compared it to eating from a trough, while Futurism called it “bottom-of-the-barrel slop”.

In truth, you will not watch Fairground AI Creator TV, and that’s sort of the point. This is television with vanishingly low production costs. Compare an hour of this cheap slop with, say, the tens of millions of dollars it takes to produce an episode of Stranger Things, and you’ll soon understand why executives might find the prospect irresistible. In this landscape you don’t need breakout hits, just enough stoned and curious students at 3am to turn a profit.

That said, I have actually just spent a few hours watching Fairground AI Creator TV, more out of self-hatred than anything else, and it would appear that the early reviews are right. On the plus side, the channel is evidence that artificial intelligence has come on in leaps and bounds over the last couple of years. Had this been attempted in 2023, we would have had a 24/7 feed of mutant Will Smith choking down handfuls of writhing spaghetti, and everyone would have vomited themselves dry. Generally speaking, what Fairground has to offer is much better.

However, it is still awful. Categorically, catastrophically awful. The channel doesn’t so much offer shows as a drifting dreamscape of bad ideas rendered as horribly as possible with no thought paid to scheduling. At one point on Wednesday, a shrill high-frequency anime gave way to a long and staid German-language short about Nazi bureaucracy. After that came a sort of Gladiator ripoff that had all the dynamism of an exhibit you’d see at the fourth-best museum on a poorly planned family holiday.