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Fox is dropping $22 billion to put itself inside 100 million living rooms. The media giant announced Monday it’s buying streaming platform Roku in a merger that will make the company the third-largest player in U.S. television, according to Variety.
The move solves a problem for Fox. Ever since selling most of its entertainment assets to Disney in 2019, Fox has been left with live news and sports and no streaming muscle of its own. The merger with Roku would fix that. The irony is that Fox once owned a slice of Roku and sold it in 2020. Now it’s buying the whole company back in what Fox’s CEO Lachlan Murdoch called “a defining moment .”
Roku spent 24 years as a scrappy independent, fighting off Amazon, Google and Apple to stay alive. It only turned its first profit in 2025 before agreeing to sell. The deal is a bet that in the streaming era, owning great content isn’t enough. You have to own the platform people watch it on.