Fox acquires Roku in streaming and advertising shake-up

Fox’s planned acquisition of Roku underscored how far the streaming company has moved from its roots as a hardware maker. Roku spent the past year leaning harder into advertising, subscriptions and live programming, turning itself into a platform with more leverage in a consolidating streaming market, where scale, data and distribution increasingly matter more than the device on the television set.

Fox and Roku publicly announced the deal on June 15, 2026, and Roku said on its investor-relations page that the transaction was expected to close in the first half of 2027. Roku stock was listed at $137.29 on June 17. Fox said the combination would bring together its sports, news and entertainment content, along with Tubi, and Roku’s connected TV platform, The Roku Channel, first-party data and direct relationship with more than 100 million global streaming households.

The numbers explain why Roku now looks more like a media platform than a box company. In February 2026, Roku said it ended 2025 with more than 90 million logged-in streaming households globally. It also said The Roku Channel reached an all-time high in December 2025, accounting for 6.3% of all TV streaming, up from 4.6% a year earlier. Roku said the service was the No. 2 free, ad-supported streaming app in the United States and the No. 5 streaming app overall. Video advertising on the platform grew faster than the U.S. OTT market and the broader digital ad market in 2025.

That momentum built on Roku’s 2024 scale. The company reported 89.8 million streaming households, 127.1 billion streaming hours, $4.1 billion in total net revenue and $3.5 billion in platform revenue for full-year 2024. In the second quarter of 2025, platform revenue reached $975 million, up 18% from a year earlier, showing how much of Roku’s business now depends on monetizing viewers rather than selling hardware.

Sports has become a central part of that strategy. Roku said in its second-quarter 2025 shareholder letter that it highlights sports through a dedicated Sports Experience, and The Roku Channel was the exclusive home of MLB Sunday Leadoff for a second straight year. Charlie Collier, Roku Media’s president, has said Roku wants to make sports easier to find and stream, including shoulder programming even when it does not own the rights. Roku’s $185 million acquisition of Frndly TV in May 2025, a bundle that added live TV, on-demand video and cloud DVR, fit the same pattern. The Fox deal now makes that pivot look less like an experiment and more like the company’s next profit center.