What happened
Fox Corp. said Monday it was buying streaming and smart-TV company Roku for $22 billion, its first major acquisition since chief executive Lachlan Murdoch cemented control of his family’s media empire last year. The deal will give Fox, with its news and live sports content, a foothold in the more than 100 million households that use Roku’s platform.
Who said what
The cash-and-stock deal “would make the Murdoch media empire a formidable contender in the streaming wars,” positioning Fox to “reach customers who are abandoning traditional TV,” The New York Times said. Specifically, it would transform the company into a “major player in free, ad-supported streaming,” The Washington Post said, combining Fox-owned Tubi with Roku’s own “free-to-stream, ad-supported offering.”
Fox’s “bigger play here is advertising revenue, something all the major streamers are now jockeying for,” Forrester research director Mike Proulx said in a statement. “If this deal closes, Fox will control more of what viewers watch, how they discover it and how it gets monetized.”
What next?
Fox and Roku said their merger, expected to close in the first half of 2027, would create the “third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing.”