Fox to buy Roku in $22 billion streaming deal

Fox moved to buy Roku for $160 a share in cash and stock, a deal it said values the connected-TV company at about $22 billion and could close in the first half of 2027. The combination would join Fox’s sports, news and entertainment businesses, including Tubi, with Roku’s platform, The Roku Channel and first-party data, giving Fox a direct line to more than 100 million streaming households worldwide.

The deal lands at the center of a fast-changing television market, where the fight is no longer just over programming but over who owns the screen, the data and the ad inventory that come with it. Fox said the merged business would be one of the largest streaming operations in the United States and, on a pro forma basis, the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing. That scale is likely to sharpen antitrust and consumer-choice questions, especially if a single owner gains more leverage over how audiences discover content and how advertisers reach them across broadcast, cable and streaming.

Fox said it will keep Roku operating as an open, partner-friendly platform and preserve an investment-grade balance sheet. It also said it plans to maintain uninterrupted shareholder returns. To finance the cash portion of the purchase, Fox said it will use cash on hand and new debt, and later disclosed it had secured a $12 billion loan for the transaction.

Lachlan K. Murdoch called the acquisition a defining moment for Fox and said the company had been an early investor in Roku and a longtime commercial partner. He also said Tubi and The Roku Channel will remain separate after the deal closes because the services are “incredibly complementary,” with about a third audience overlap. That separation is meant to ease concerns that Fox would fold Roku into a closed ecosystem, but the transaction still hands Fox a far deeper role in the plumbing of the living room screen.

Roku’s latest full-year results show why Fox wants it. The company reported 89.8 million streaming households in 2024, $4.1 billion in total revenue and 127.1 billion streaming hours. Roku said its U.S. streaming audience reached households with about 145 million people in late 2024, underscoring the scale of the audience Fox is trying to reach as viewers keep moving away from linear TV.

The acquisition is also Fox’s biggest move since selling most of its entertainment assets to Disney for $71 billion in 2019 and buying Tubi for $440 million in 2020. After years of streaming disruption, Fox is trying to control more of the path between the viewer and the screen, and that is exactly why regulators, rivals and advertisers will be watching the deal so closely.