Fox acquires Roku in a $22bn deal that drags the cable-reliant broadcaster squarely into streaming. Fox Corporation will pay $160 a share, in cash and stock, for the maker of the streaming sticks and smart TVs sitting in more than 100 million households worldwide, the companies said on Monday.
The structure is $96 in cash plus 0.9693 Fox Class A shares for each Roku share, an enterprise value of about $22bn. Fox shareholders will own roughly 73 per cent of the combined company and Roku holders about 27 per cent. Fox has lined up $12bn in bridge financing from Morgan Stanley, expects to close in the first half of 2027, and will put Roku founder Anthony Wood on its board.
Why Fox wants Roku
Fox is buying a front door. Roku’s platform reaches more than half of all US broadband homes, and it is where many people land before they pick an app. That position, not the hardware, is the prize.
The money tells the same story. Roku makes most of its revenue from advertising and distribution, not devices: its platform segment brought in $4.1bn last year, 87.5 per cent of the total. Owning it hands Fox a connected-TV ad business, first-party viewer data, and a home screen to push its own services. Fold in Fox’s live sport and news, the NFL, MLB, the FIFA World Cup, and Fox News, plus its free streamer Tubi and The Roku Channel, and the pair claim one of the largest streaming businesses in the country.
A bet on where TV is going
The logic is the same one reshaping the whole industry: content and distribution are collapsing into each other. Fox spent the last decade narrowing to live news and sports, then bought Tubi in 2020. Roku is the next, larger step, taking it from a channel owner to the platform the channels run on.
It also lands in the middle of a media-consolidation wave. It comes days after the US Justice Department cleared Paramount’s $110bn purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, and as players race to stitch their streaming stacks together for scale. Lachlan Murdoch, Fox’s executive chair, called it “a defining moment.” Wood called it “an extraordinary opportunity.”
What to watch
The deal is agreed, not done. It needs sign-off from both sets of shareholders and from US and some non-US regulators, though Wood and trusts holding most of Roku’s voting power have already committed their votes. On paper the combined firm would be the third-largest US player by share of viewing, the kind of scale that draws scrutiny, even if Fox’s content and Roku’s pipes are more complementary than overlapping.
Fox is promising to keep Roku “open” and “partner-friendly,” which matters: Roku’s value rests on being a neutral storefront for rivals like Netflix and Disney. The test is whether a Fox-owned Roku still feels neutral once Fox content sits on the home screen. Fox expects about $400m in cost savings and says the deal pays for itself on free cash flow by year two. The harder question is whether it can own the front door without scaring off everyone else who walks through it.
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