‘PBS Retro’ is coming to Roku as a FAST channel

PBS is making child edutainment classics like Zoboomafoo, Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, and Reading Rainbow available for free on a new ‘PBS Retro’ channel on Roku.

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Parents, it’s time to green-light more screen time.

PBS classics from the ’70s, ’80s, and ’90s, including titles like Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood and Thomas and Friends, are coming to streaming. PBS Distribution is making the edutainment programming available for free in the form of a FAST (free, ad-supported streaming) channel called PBS Retro, which is accessible through The Roku Channel.

“We identified an interest in connecting audiences with the content they grew up watching,” PBS distribution president Andrea Downing told The Wrap. The Roku Channel is home to other PBS FAST channels as well, including PBS Antiques Road Show, Antiques Road Trip, PBS Food, Julia Child, and PBS Nature.

The Roku Channel is becoming increasingly popular, gaining diverse content like news and sports — and can be watched on Roku devices, web browsers, and even Google TV. The service operates in a format similar to over-the-air programming, where you flip to a channel and watch whatever is on at the time.

That means you can’t flip to PBS Retro and demand to watch the theme song for the show with the talking lemur (that’s what YouTube is for). But you can give your child a rest from choice fatigue as episodes of Reading Rainbow, Kratt's Creatures, Zoboomafoo, and others cycle and repeat.