Roku is creating a real-life version of its Roku City screensaver in Austin, Texas, during the SXSW festival in March.

Working with Best Buy is turning a multi-story building into Roku City featuring the Best Buy Home Theater Experience. 

The pop-up exhibit will feature a purple-themed Roku City Style Show, a Roku City Rooftop Diner with reservations available via OpenTable and a menu loaded with movie and TV references, and Roku City Park, where people can walk under the trees, watch monsters and sip coffee.

“The opening of Roku City offers the opportunity to spark conversations around the ways brands can activate based on organic feedback from their audiences while also exploring the continued value of  IRL experiences in our increasingly digital-first world,” the company said.

The Roku City featuring the Best Buy Home Theater experience will be open to the public on March 11 and March 12. ■

The City of Austin has canceled music and tech festival South by Southwest over coronavirus concerns, event organizers announced Friday.

"We are devastated to share this news with you," organizers said in a statement. "'The show must go on' is in our DNA, and this is the first time in 34 years that the March event will not take place. We are now working through the ramifications of this unprecedented situation."

SXSW was slated to run in Austin from March 13-22. The festival had seen a number of companies pull out of the event, including Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Twitter, as fears over coronavirus have spread.

Coronavirus Cancellations: Everything You Need to Know

Officials said they are looking into possibly rescheduling and "are working to provide a virtual SXSW online experience as soon as possible for 2020 participants, starting with SXSW EDU."

SXSW is the latest in a string of event cancellations. Earlier this week, Fox News and Comcast's FreeWheel axed their upfront events. MIPTV and Mobile World Congress were also canceled.

Showtime has released the trailer for the new unscripted docuseries Outcry. The first look will take place at the SXSW festival on March 14. The series will premiere April 3 and there will be five parts.

Outcry follows the case of Greg Kelley, a high school senior who was arrested and convicted of sexual assault on a child and sentenced to 25 years without the possibility of parole. The series will call into question the validity of the conviction and the support surrounding the case.

Outcry is produced and directed by Pat Kondelis and his Bat Bridge Entertainment production company. 

AUSTIN, Texas — It’s no longer enough for TV brands to reach fans just by being on the air: these days, they also need a strong ground game, meeting fans where they live and bringing them fun ways to interact with the shows they love.

That’s largely the point of TV network involvement at the annual South by Southwest (SXSW) festival, which offers attendees panels and experiences on everything from blockchain technology — what the heck is it, for example — to e-sports to comedy, film and the genre that started it all, music.

TV is a relative newcomer to the annual 10-day gathering (March 9-18 this year) that started 31 years ago with just over 700 registrants. Today, some 300,000 people attend some part of SXSW, whether that’s the music, interactive, film, education or other tracks, such as the rapidly growing comedy and gaming segments.

Many TV brands were present at this year’s SXSW, including HBO, Showtime, Comedy Central, DirecTV, Syfy, TBS, Freeform, Fox Sports, Netflix, YouTube and more. Several TV shows — including HBO’s Barry, Syfy’s Krypton, Freeform’s Marvel’s Cloak & Dagger and TBSs’ The Last O.G. — premiered at SXSW, while many other networks offered activations.

One of the year’s most visible activations was HBO’s recreation of Westworld’s town of Sweetwater, which agency Giant Spoon and the premium network spent four months setting up at J. Lorraine Ghost Town Manor just outside of Austin. It was probably one of the festival’s toughest tickets to get, with would-be attendees waiting hours for limited seats on one of HBO’s buses out of town.

Once in Sweetwater, attendees could visit the Mariposa Saloon for a stiff drink at the bar (although to be honest, drinks are never in short supply at SXSW) or talk to some of Sweetwater’s denizens.

Parties With a Purpose

Somewhat easier to get into and far longer running was Rachael Ray’s Feedback, a daylong concert held at Stubb’s BBQ that Ray has been hosting for the past 11 years. This year featured such acts as Salt-N-Pepa, Girl Talk and Dr. Pepper’s Jaded Hearts Club Band, an all-star Beatles cover band starring Muse lead singer Matt Bellamy and Nine Inch Nails’s Ilan Rubin. Attendees also were treated to free food — a la Ray’s own recipes — and drinks, including beer from sponsor Modelo.

The digital team from Rachael Ray’s daytime talk show also was on hand to capture content from the proceedings and post it to the show’s website. Ray also held the more intimate Rachael Ray Feedback House party and a fashion pop-up during SXSW. While these events do serve to promote her overall brand, they are far more about giving back to fans.

“We offer free music, free booze, free food and there are people who drive in from hundreds of miles away, people who love the music, love the food and love what she’s doing,” said Andrew Kaplan, vice president of culinary operations for Rachael Ray.

Right across the street from Rachael Ray’s Feedback was Comedy Central’s Backyard Bash, which has been held at Pelons/50 Tequila Bar since 2014. The space has lots of small rooms and indoor and outdoor space, which lets Comedy Central showcase many shows, including Broad City, Corporate, Drunk History, Detroiters and more. Attendees to the free event get two drink tickets, tacos and all the time at the Drunk History dunk tank and Broad City friendship bracelet-making booth they could want.

“This started off as an event where we wanted to do something very modular, where we could always be adding new pieces,” Comedy Central senior vice president of brand activation Shawn Silverman said.

Since 2014, Comedy Central has been making an effort to do much more on-the-ground marketing, starting with events such as SXSW and Comic-Con, and extending this year, for the second year in a row, to Clusterfest in San Francisco.

Warner Bros. also brought its DC Entertainment pop-up to the festival, setting up its mobile Super Hero Lair where people could check out Batmobiles and Batcycles off of Batman and Justice League movie sets, as well as participate in an activation for Syfy’s new series Krypton, about Superman’s grandfather, and take selfies with Teen Titans Go!

Earlier this year, Warner Bros. brought the pop up to Washington, D.C. “We’re trying to customize it for each market we go into,” Lisa Gregorian, president and CMO, Warner Bros. Television Group, said.

For Gregorian and her team, the pop-up represents much more than just a quick activation. It’s an exhibit of American culture and history, focusing on the uniquely American art form of comic books.

“If you go back in history between 1880 and 1920, more than 30 million people immigrated to the U.S. during that time,” she said. “Two young guys in Cleveland created a character about what it was like to be an immigrant. That character was Superman. He had to find his way in America, he had to assimilate, he had to leave behind who he was and not be able to return to his home.”

Showtime Bellies Up

Showtime held a three-day party at the Clive Bar on Rainey Street, which the network turned into Showtime House. Each day celebrated a different series, with SMILF taking its turn on Thursday (March 15), The Chi on Friday and Shameless on Saturday, which coincided with St. Patrick’s Day and the festival’s last day.

“People who go to SXSW tend to be hyper-social in terms of how they share their experiences on social platforms,” Showtime Networks chief marketing officer Don Buckley told Multichannel News. “And it’s a subscriber- acquisition opportunity as well, so we’re going there to proudly showcase some of our key shows.”

That summarizes many TV brands’ approach to SXSW: appeal to the influencers, and then let the influencers bring in other fans.

Roku and Brightcove announced they are each playing a technology role in the delivery of on-demand content from SXSW, a nine-day music, entertainment and tech festival in Austin that kicks off March 13.

Roku said it is the first streaming platform to feature SXSW On, an on-demand channel that will be offered on Roku players in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., Republic of Ireland, as well as Roku TV-powered models in the U.S. 

SXSW On, which will feature highlights from the event, including interviews, panel sessions and music performances, has a custom-designed Roku channel, complementing access at SXSW.com and on YouTube. Roku said the SXSW On channel for its platform was created in partnership with Roku streaming channel provider Float Left Interactive.

Further behind the scenes, Brightcove will provide the cloud-based video publishing and encoding platform powering SXSW’s on-demand offerings.

“For the first time, people from around the world will be able to view the excitement and entertainment of SXSW live without buying a plane ticket to Austin,” said Ed Lee, VP of content at Roku, in a statement.