Fox paid $160 a share for Roku: $96 in cash plus 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A stock, putting enterprise value at $22 billion. Roku opened Monday at $143.90 before the announcement, about 11% below the deal price, but the stock had already run 20% the Friday before on acquisition rumors. The undisturbed premium is closer to a third.
What does Fox actually get? Roku’s platform reaches more than half of U.S. broadband households and leads all streaming services in hours watched in the U.S., Canada, and Mexico. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch called it the natural next step after Fox’s 2019 pivot to news and live sports and its 2020 purchase of Tubi: buying the platform its content already runs on.
Tubi and The Roku Channel will operate as separate services post-close, with roughly a third of their audiences overlapping. Keeping the platform open also keeps it attractive to rivals that can’t afford to lose the distribution; a closed Roku would immediately shrink the audience Fox just paid $22 billion for.
The closest structural comp is Comcast’s $39 billion Sky deal in 2018: a broadcaster buying its distribution layer. Fox is doing the same play on streaming and didn’t pay Comcast’s price for it. Fox disclosed $400 million in projected run-rate cost synergies; the ad-targeting flywheel from 100 million streaming households is what makes $22 billion defensible.
DOJ cleared the $110 billion Paramount Skydance merger with Warner Bros. Discovery last week, easing the regulatory path. Close: first half of 2027.
Diana Kowalski