With its $22 billion deal to acquire Roku earlier this month, Fox suddenly became a “rather ferocious” player in “the next phase of the streaming wars,” said The Economist. Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing media empire had been a “noncombatant” in the years-long melee, preferring to keep “its powder dry while companies such as Disney blew gazillions on building streaming services to compete with Netflix.” But it has been quietly amassing a substantial streaming portfolio, beginning in 2020 with Tubi—a free, ad-supported service now with as many viewers as Paramount and NBCUniversal’s Peacock—and launching Fox One last year. With Roku, which sells smart TVs and streaming hardware and software, and has its own streaming channel, Fox would become the third-largest streaming company behind YouTube and Netflix, commanding “11% of streaming viewership in America.”
Fox is finally looking beyond cable, said David Dayen in The American Prospect. Only 36% of households in the U.S. had linear TV in 2025, according to Pew Research Center data, down from 85% a decade ago. And only 16% of those cable subscribers are under 30. “It’s a matter of time” before these whole cable systems “are shut down.” Roku’s easy-to-use hardware has made it “essentially the cable box of the 21st century.” This deal gives Fox “control of that box.” We’ve hit “a turning point in the streaming wars,” said Sara Fischer in Axios, which is no longer a race to gather the most subscribers. It’s a race to see who has a bigger “competitive edge against Netflix.” For Fox, that means “bringing more eyeballs to its live programming” like news and sports, “and selling more digital TV ads.”
“What a shame,” said Devindra Hardawar in Engadget. Roku began as “an innovative streaming platform” that “pushed TVs to be smarter.” Now it’ll be just “another cog in the Murdoch empire,” soon to be “flooded with Fox News content and ads.” That it comes so shortly after Paramount, and its right-wing ownership, bought Warner Bros. Discovery is “yet another sign of media consolidation” that will “ultimately make our lives worse.”
This is Lachlan Murdoch’s biggest move since taking over from his 95-year-old father as Fox CEO in 2019, said Chris Hughes in Bloomberg. And it’s a risky gamble. Yes, he “had to do something sooner or later to address Fox’s reliance on legacy cable TV.” But this attempt “to future-proof Fox is looking incredibly expensive.” Fox offered $160 a share, “nearly 40% above Roku’s stock price.” That’s a $7 billion premium. “Cue a savage market reaction,” which slashed $4 billion off Fox’s valuation. Lachlan has spent the past couple years “tidying up his family’s messy ownership of the media empire,” which had lifted Fox’s stock price. We’ll have to wait and see if this “plot twist” pays off.