Roku’s new AI channel is a 24/7 trough of machine-generated slop

Roku this week quietly added something genuinely depressing to its free streaming lineup: a 24/7 channel filled entirely with AI-generated video. The channel comes from Fairground, a startup launched in 2025 by Colin Petrie-Norris, and it represents a new low in the FAST (free ad-supported television) space — content that doesn’t even pretend to compete with human-made entertainment.

Fairground AI Creator TV serves up an endless rotation of short videos produced by creators using text-to-video models. There’s no rhyme or reason to the programming. In one hour of watching, I saw AI anime that looked ripped from existing shows, uncanny-valley “live-action” horror about defeating a demon with mockery, and a Greek fantasy that might have been loosely inspired by The Odyssey. Some clips have semi-coherent narratives and show signs of post-production editing — but the overall shoddiness is impossible to ignore, especially when the stream cuts to ads for actual Roku movies made by actual humans.

What makes this particularly grim is the business model behind it. Fairground says it pays content partners for their generations and gives them an undisclosed revenue share, though the company is silent about which AI models it uses or whether it secured rights to training data. The startup’s pitch — content designed for “the living room, not the feed” — suggests they’re targeting people who want background noise rather than something worth watching. And that’s exactly what Roku is platforming.

Most AI video startups talk about revolutionizing Hollywood. Fairground seems to have lower ambitions: just existing in the same space as real programming and hoping nobody notices the difference. Roku apparently thinks that’s good enough. The company is entering what can only be described as its Fox era — prioritizing cheap, algorithmically generated filler over curation. For viewers, the result is a channel that feels less like television and more like a trough. You can scrub forward and backward, but you can’t choose what plays. You just get what the machine spits out. And what it spits out is slop.