The Fox News electronic news ticker reads news headlines from News Corp. Building in Midtown Manhattan in New York City, US, July 20, 2025.
Eduardo Munoz Reuters
Fox Corp. you have reached an agreement to acquire Roku for an estimated $22 billion, marking another chapter in media consolidation as the industry faces ever-changing and growing challenges.
On Monday Fox announced it would buy Roku for $160 per share in cash and stock. Fox plans to finance part of the deal with a combination of existing equity and new debt. The company said it received $12 billion in loans for doing this.
Fox’s shares were trading down about 15% in premarket trading. Roku was largely unchanged on Monday, though that stock gained 20% on Friday on early reports of a potential sale.
The combination will include Fox’s news and sports channels, as well as its free Tubi broadcaster with Roku, the maker of streaming devices and home of The Roku Channel, a Tubi-like service.
On Monday, Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch called it a “defining moment” for the company.
The proposed purchase comes nearly seven years after Fox’s last major deal, when it divested its entertainment assets in a $71 billion deal. Disney. Since then, Fox’s portfolio has mainly been made up of television channels, namely the Fox broadcast network, which has been broadcasting the FIFA World Cup since last week, and the Fox News Channel on cable.
In 2020 Fox acquired Tubi for $440 million. That service had long been its answer to the broadcast wars, before the announcement of Fox One, its direct-to-consumer option launched last year.
On Monday’s call with investors, Murdoch noted that Fox was both “an early investor in Roku and a long-term commercial partner.”
He added that starting in 2019, Fox has “restructured” the company, focused it on live news and sports, and emphasized the focus on driving advertising revenue.
Advertising has taken on renewed importance for media companies as they look to build broadcast platforms and rely on sports and live events, which capture large audiences.
Murdoch said Monday in a call to investors that the companies intend to keep Tubi and The Roku Channel separate after the deal closes. He called them “incredibly complementary services” that see about a third of the overlap among their viewers.
Tubi sees many of its viewers for on-demand content, unlike free channels that mimic the bulk of traditional pay TV.
A video sign shows the logo of Roku, a video streaming company, in Times Square after the company’s initial public offering on the Nasdaq Market in New York on September 28, 2017.
Brendan McDermid | Reuters
“Roku has a very large platform business that includes advertising and subscriptions,” Roku CEO Anthony Wood said on a call Monday.
Wood called the Roku platform the market leader in the US and said it reaches more than 100 million streaming households worldwide, accounting for 145 billion hours a year.
Both Woods and Murdoch said their companies are entering the deal “from a position of strength.”
Murdoch added that the addition of Roku allows Fox to “go into new markets to grow, obviously with digital in broadcast and subscription, and drive the business more powerfully in the 21st century.”
Fox said Monday it expects to see about $400 million in run-rate cost synergies from the deal and additional revenue gains. Following the closing of the acquisition, existing Fox shareholders will own approximately 73% of the combined company and Roku shareholders will own approximately 27%.
The deal, which has already been approved by the boards of directors of both companies, is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
