Fox wants to take over your TV — and the tech inside it

Fox is about to take over the TVs in more than 100 million homes worldwide. On Monday, Fox announced that it’s acquiring Roku, the streaming middleman that serves as a portal for viewers to hop into services like Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and more. The $22 billion deal may not change Roku’s familiar purple interface, but it could put Fox in control of your data behind the screen.

During a call with investors, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch said the plan is to keep the two companies separate. Fox aims to grow its business by adding Fox Sports, news content, and local stations to Roku — one of the most popular streaming device and smart TV platforms. “I would expect that we can grow our viewership in the US with a combination of Roku technology, Roku’s platform, the tremendous content that’s on the Roku channel, and the content that Fox brings to it as well,” Murdoch said.

Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood, who will have a role at the combined company after the deal closes in 2027, echoed this idea, saying that the streaming platform would feature Fox content on its homescreen, which currently shows a large marquee ad, along with a carousel filled with suggested shows and movies. “Most items on the homescreen are personalized in the sense that we decide what to show a customer based on what they’re most likely to watch, what they’re most likely to buy,” Wood told investors. “Having more properties that generate more revenue — and being able to decide when to promote them and when not to promote them — will result in overall more revenue being generated by the homescreen.”

The multibillion-dollar deal may not result in an obvious branding change for Roku, but it may raise alarm bells for the people paying attention to the recent wave of media acquisitions that have put the Trump-friendly Ellison family in charge of Warner Bros. Discovery, Paramount, CBS News, and, to an extent, TikTok. Lachlan Murdoch, who took the reins of Fox and its Trump-aligned news network last year, also owns The Wall Street Journal parent company News Corp. “In the Trump era, these deals have huge political implications that really need to be focused on,” Jeff Chester, the executive director of the Center for Digital Democracy, a nonprofit digital rights and consumer protection organization, tells The Verge. “Perhaps people will get the message that this is not just a media deal, this is the further political alignment of US media assets into MAGA-friendly hands.”

Though Roku is known for its fleet of streaming sticks and affordable TVs, it makes most of its money by selling ads across its platform and the commission it earns when people sign up for a premium streaming service through its interface. In April, Roku offered a breakdown of how much it earns from both segments for the first time. It reported earning $613 million from advertising, while subscriptions raked in $519 million during the quarter. “Fox is getting a lot in terms of this deal, as far as distribution goes,” Dan Rayburn, a streaming media analyst, tells The Verge, adding that Fox will also gain “insight into all the data on what people are watching.”

Roku offers a limited amount of original content through The Roku Channel, its free, ad-supported streaming (FAST) service, which directly competes with Fox’s own FAST service, Tubi. Despite the similarities between both services, Murdoch told investors that one-third of Tubi viewers overlap with the people watching The Roku Channel. “Bring the two of them together, [and it] effectively triples the reach of the combined service,” Murdoch said. “It’s too early to say, but our expectation is fully to keep the services separate. They serve consumers or viewers in different ways.”

Roku has begun dabbling in paid subscriptions, too, with the acquisition of the $6.99-per-month Frndly streaming service, followed by the launch of Howdy, an even cheaper $2.99-per-month ad-free streaming subscription. Meanwhile, Fox recently launched its own Fox One streaming service and also has a deal with Hulu to air shows like Family Guy and The Masked Singer on the platform. With this deal, Roku could gain access to premium content to put inside its services.

“I wouldn’t be surprised if Roku is now like, ‘Okay, well, now let’s go look at some content we think worked great for our platform, and we have the backing to do it,”’ Rayburn says.

As we saw with Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, Fox may not see much pushback from federal regulators. “In the US … I don’t think there’ll be any regulatory review,” Rayburn says, while casting doubt on an inquiry from the European Union, where Roku and Fox have a smaller footprint. That hands-off approach from regulators could pave the way for the deal to close next year.