Watching Roku’s AI channel is like eating from a trough
Watching Roku’s AI channel is like eating from a trough
观看 Roku 的 AI 频道就像在槽里进食
Startup Fairground wants to win people over with a never-ending stream of slop. 初创公司 Fairground 想要用源源不断的“电子垃圾”来赢得观众。
The appeal of free ad-supported streaming television (FAST) channels has always been the way they make it easier to (re)discover classic films and series. But Roku’s latest experiment in the FAST space has less to do with traditionally produced entertainment and is entirely focused on giving viewers access to a constant source of AI-generated content. 免费广告支持流媒体电视（FAST）频道的吸引力，一直在于它们让人们更容易（重新）发现经典电影和剧集。但 Roku 在 FAST 领域的最新实验与传统制作的娱乐内容关系不大，而是完全专注于为观众提供源源不断的 AI 生成内容。
This week, Roku added four new channels to its library of streamable programming. Along with dedicated feeds for old episodes of Mad TV, Whose Line Is It Anyway?, and a variety of Black sitcoms, the platform also debuted a 24/7 stream filled with projects from Colin Petrie-Norris’ AI startup, Fairground. Partnering with Roku is a significant step up for Fairground, which launched in 2025 and is reportedly working on its own AI-generated adaptations of Robin Hood and Dracula. But watching the Fairground channel, you get the distinct sense that Roku hasn’t really gotten all that much out of the deal aside from the ability to say that it’s getting in on the gen AI craze. 本周，Roku 在其流媒体节目库中增加了四个新频道。除了播放《疯狂电视》（Mad TV）、《谁的台词》（Whose Line Is It Anyway?）旧剧集以及各种黑人情景喜剧的专属频道外，该平台还推出了一个 24/7 全天候直播流，内容全部来自 Colin Petrie-Norris 的 AI 初创公司 Fairground。与 Roku 的合作对 2025 年成立的 Fairground 来说是一个重大飞跃，据报道，该公司目前正在制作其 AI 生成的《罗宾汉》和《德古拉》改编作品。但观看 Fairground 频道时，你会明显感觉到，除了能宣称自己赶上了生成式 AI 的热潮外，Roku 从这笔交易中并没有获得太多实质性的东西。
Like all FAST channels, Fairground AI Creator TV is filled with a curated selection of programming that you’re meant to watch somewhat passively. While you can scrub forward and backward a few seconds, there’s no way to choose exactly what kinds of videos the channel serves up. That might add a fun sense of discovery to the channel if it featured series and films that were actually riveting. But everything that I saw while watching for about an hour was more or less the same kind of short-form slop that text-to-video models have become known for. 像所有 FAST 频道一样，Fairground AI Creator TV 充满了精心挑选的节目，旨在让你以一种相对被动的方式观看。虽然你可以前后快进或快退几秒钟，但无法选择频道具体播放哪种视频。如果频道播放的是真正引人入胜的剧集和电影，这或许会增添一种有趣的发现感。但我观看大约一小时所看到的一切，几乎都是文本生成视频模型所特有的那种短小、粗糙的“电子垃圾”。
Aside from being produced with AI, there’s no consistent theme or genre to any of Fairground’s programming — all of which is made by a selection of content creators who have partnered with the company. Some videos are clearly generated by models trained on footage ripped from professionally produced anime, while others just look like terrible “lifelike” CGI. Surprisingly, there were semi-cohesive narratives to some of what I watched. I could follow what was going on in a “live-action” horror about people destroying a demon by making fun of it, and I got the sense that a fantasy about Greek heroes might have been inspired by The Odyssey. 除了由 AI 制作外，Fairground 的节目没有任何连贯的主题或类型——所有内容均由与该公司合作的精选内容创作者制作。有些视频显然是由基于专业动画素材训练的模型生成的，而另一些看起来就像糟糕的“写实”CGI。令人惊讶的是，我观看的部分内容竟然有半连贯的叙事。我能看懂一部关于人们通过嘲笑来消灭恶魔的“真人”恐怖片，也能感觉到一部关于希腊英雄的奇幻片可能受到了《奥德赛》的启发。
You can tell from the videos’ length and the way their audio is mixed that there was some degree of post-production editing. But the videos’ general lack of visual polish makes it obvious that they were cobbled together from machine-generated clips rather than shots crafted by a human artist. And the overall shoddiness of Fairground’s programming becomes especially apparent whenever the stream cuts to an ad — this is a FAST channel — for one of the traditionally produced movies and shows Roku offers. 从视频的长度和音频混合方式可以看出，它们经过了一定程度的后期剪辑。但视频在视觉上的普遍粗糙，让人一眼就能看出它们是由机器生成的片段拼凑而成的，而非人类艺术家精心制作的镜头。每当直播流切换到 Roku 提供的传统制作电影或节目的广告时（毕竟这是个 FAST 频道），Fairground 节目的整体低劣感就显得尤为明显。
Fairground’s website makes a point of emphasizing that it pays its content partners for their generations in addition to giving them an undisclosed share of the platform’s revenue. There’s no mention of which models are used to create Fairground’s content or whether it secured rights to use whatever training data is in the mix. But Fairground does stress that its programming is designed for “the living room, not the feed,” which says a lot about what kind of niche Petrie-Norris and his team are trying to carve out. Fairground 的网站特别强调，除了向内容合作伙伴支付未公开的平台收入分成外，还会为他们的创作付费。网站没有提及 Fairground 使用了哪些模型来创作内容，也没有说明是否获得了混合训练数据的使用权。但 Fairground 确实强调，其节目是为“客厅而非信息流”设计的，这充分说明了 Petrie-Norris 和他的团队试图开辟什么样的利基市场。
Most AI production startups have framed themselves as being poised to revolutionize the entertainment industry with technologies that will render traditional production workflows obsolete. Generally, the “Hollywood is so cooked” set insists that AI will soon be able to churn out films and shows comparable to a major studio’s, but that doesn’t really seem like the approach Fairground is leaning into. Rather than trying to be just as good or better than regular programming, it feels like Fairground simply wants its content to exist in the same general space as stuff that people might intentionally go looking for. Apparently, Roku thinks Fairground’s offerings are good enough to be platformed, which is depressing, but not altogether shocking as the company enters its Fox era. 大多数 AI 制作初创公司都将自己定位为准备通过技术彻底改变娱乐业，使传统制作流程过时。通常，“好莱坞完蛋了”派坚持认为 AI 很快就能制作出媲美大型制片厂的电影和节目，但 Fairground 似乎并不倾向于这种做法。Fairground 似乎并不想做得和常规节目一样好甚至更好，它只是想让自己的内容存在于人们可能会主动寻找的领域中。显然，Roku 认为 Fairground 的产品足以登上平台，这令人沮丧，但考虑到该公司正进入其“福克斯时代”，这也不足为奇。
Fairgrounds’ content isn’t at all impressive, but its presence on Roku gives the startup a way to reach a massive audience of potential viewers. It’s easy to imagine an AI company seeing a business opportunity in the “looking for something mindless to play in the background” crowd, but this stuff doesn’t feel like something anyone would want to put on. Fairground 的内容一点也不令人印象深刻，但它在 Roku 上的存在为这家初创公司提供了一种接触海量潜在观众的途径。很容易想象，一家 AI 公司会在“寻找背景播放的无脑内容”的人群中看到商机，但这些东西看起来并不像是任何人会主动想要播放的内容。