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Fox now owns the front door to more than 100 million American living rooms. The media company closed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku on Friday, less than five months after the deal was announced in June — and well ahead of the first-half-of-2027 timetable the two companies originally gave. Roku shares have stopped trading on the Nasdaq, and the streaming platform that built its name on neutrality is now part of the Murdoch family's media empire.
What Fox paid — and what Roku owners got
Under the terms of the merger, Roku stockholders receive $95.30 in cash and 0.9799 shares of Fox Class A common stock for each Roku share they held — valuing Roku at roughly $160 a share. Former Roku investors now own about 26% of the combined company, with existing Fox shareholders holding the other 74%. Fox confirmed the closing in a securities filing, and Roku founder Anthony Wood is joining Fox's board of directors.
The deal is the largest in Fox's history. It pairs Fox's live sports, news and local broadcasting with a connected-TV platform reaching more than 100 million streaming households — a combination Fox says makes it the third-largest television business in the United States by share of viewing. Fox already owns Tubi, the free ad-supported service with about 110 million monthly active users; together, Tubi and Roku accounted for 4.8% of streaming viewership in August, tying Disney's share.
Why regulators let it through
The closing came only after the U.S. Department of Justice finished a second-request antitrust review and closed its investigation the same day. According to reports from TheWrap and the Justice Department's own announcement, the division concluded that the entry of free, ad-supported streaming providers would be timely and sufficient to make a substantial risk of harm to competition unlikely — and that Fox would damage Roku's own business if it tried to squeeze rivals off the platform.
Fox still had to make promises. As part of the clearance, the company committed that Roku will remain an open and neutral platform, that it will keep carrying non-Fox content for at least three years on terms consistent with past practice, and that it will preserve contractual protections for the viewing, search and voice data its rival content partners generate on Roku. The Antitrust Division said it will keep assessing competition in the industry and may act if circumstances change.
What changes for viewers
Fox is reorganising its digital business around the purchase. Roku, Tubi, the Fox One streaming service and podcast producer Red Seat Ventures now sit inside a new division, Fox Digital Platforms, co-chaired by Anthony Wood and Paul Cheesbrough, who serves as its chief executive. Fox expects about $400 million in annual cost savings within two years of closing, and says the deal should add to free cash flow per share by the second full year of combined operations.
For viewers, little changes on day one: Roku keeps its name, its interface and its rival apps, and Fox insists the platform stays open. The real test comes over the next three years, when the carriage commitments expire and Fox's own services — Tubi and Fox One — compete for the same screen space as Netflix, Disney+ and every other app on a device Fox now owns. The deal closed months early and the regulators signed off; whether the neutrality promise survives contact with Fox's own streaming ambitions is the question the next few years will answer.