Roku is making a big bet on creator content, launching a new dedicated destination and multiple new creator FAST channels to its platform, The Hollywood Reporter has learned.

According to Lisa Holme, the head of content for Roku Media, the company will also increase the amount of licensed programming the platform has from top creators, with FAST channels from Prof G Podcast, iShowSpeed, Jesser, Stokes Twins and other creators set to join the platform as well.

“We just see that the demand among both audiences and, really significantly, advertisers has just continued to grow, and as Roku thinks about its content offering, we want to make sure that we have a good selection of anything that a consumer wants to watch,” Holme tells THR, adding that the platform is responding to the signals it has been getting from users. “The viewership on [creator content on Roku Channel] has continued to grow, so that’s one signal of increased demand, and then we also see what people are searching for, whether they’re watching it with us or not, and we just have seen the search traffic for this type of content, and for specific creators, and for genres of creator content has has gone up.

“The goal is to just make it easier for them to get to, since we already know they’re looking for it,” she adds.

The new creator hub will include both licensed creator content as well as programming from Roku partners like Peacock and HBO Max. Users who click through to partner programming will be redirected to those apps.

“We’ve really pulled from kind of across the whole ecosystem and tried to present it in a way that will really help our users find what they’re interested in, and so there are reality shows from Peacock that have influencers in them, just to name an example,” Holme says. “It’s really kind of the distinction of what Roku can do uniquely, which is we have every app on the platform, and we have deep integrations with most of those apps for search and browse, so that we can surface their content at the platform level, at the video level.”

Holme says that the platform is actively talking to some of the larger creators on YouTube, arguing that they can deliver an audience that is not reaching their content on the Google-owned video platform. It is a similar argument to what Netflix has told creators, though Roku’s offering is free.

“I think the first thing we’re looking for is, do they have a big audience and a big following that suggests there may even still be untapped audiences? Because Roku is generally going to provide an incremental audience than whoever they may be already reaching on YouTube,” she says.