Fox’s $22B acquisition of Roku aims to expand its reach into smart TVs, advertising.

Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku Inc. and $160 per share, an enterprise value of approximately $22 billion, the company announced today.

The acquisition would combine Fox’s broadcast channels, including Fox, Fox News, Fox Business, and FS1, as well as its advertising businesses, including Tubi, the free-to-air television streaming platform (FAST) that Fox acquired in 2020, with its Roku FAST service, The Roku Channel, and Roku’s streaming business, including its streaming sticks and smart TVs. Roku says it has 100 million households using its platform.

The most important part of Roku’s business is not its equipment, which lost $ 19.1 million in the period that ends on March 31, 2026, but it is the operating system (Roku OS) and the advertising business. In the same quarter, Roku’s advertising and subscription business generated a net profit of $584.1 million, while the advertising business generated revenue of $371 million. The COVID-19 pandemic helped Roku become profitable in 2021, but the company hasn’t seen it every year. profit again until 2025.

The planned merger aims to help Roku grow and become profitable more easily by enabling Roku to “do better than we could have done on our own, even though we’re doing better,” said Anthony Wood, Roku’s CEO, on a call with investors today.

“Fox and Roku are committed to continuing to use Roku as an open, peer-to-peer social media platform for Fox news. due to appearance As a result, the combined company will become the third-largest player in US television broadcasting, “today’s announcement said.” The numbers appear to refer to Nielsen’s March “combined views of television usage by media companies” data. The most watched distributors were YouTube (13.2 percent), The Walt Disney Company (10.5 percent in Universal / 8 percent in NBC sites). (7.2 percent), and The Roku Channel was ninth (3 percent).