Below is a roundup of last week’s notable industry news, with summaries and our opinions. Walmart and Google did a deal. Fox and Roku did an even bigger deal!

Fox to acquire Roku for $22 billion
Source: AdExchanger
June 15th, 2026

Summary: Foku?!?! The deal makes Fox the owner of the two most-watched free streaming services in the US: Tubi and The Roku Channel. Per Nielsen's March 2026 Gauge report, The Roku Channel accounted for 3% of all US TV viewing, while Tubi sat at 2.2%. Combined, that's over 5% of all TV viewing in America from two free, ad-supported services under one roof. Fox CEO Lachlan Murdoch says the two services will stay separate, at least for now. There's roughly a one-third audience overlap between them, meaning they reach different viewers. 

Fox also gets Roku's hardware business, TV operating system, first-party data from over 100M streaming households, and ad tech assets like Roku Ads Manager, a self-serve ad-buying platform for SMBs and performance advertisers. Roku had $4.7B in total 2025 revenue, up 15% YoY. 

Roku CEO Anthony Wood will stay on in an ongoing role and join Fox's board once the deal closes in the first half of 2027, pending regulatory and shareholder approval.

Fox sold its 5% stake in Roku in 2020 to fund its $440M acquisition of Tubi. Now it's paying $22B to get 100% of Roku back. Fox launched its own BVOD streaming service, Fox One, focused on live sports and other programming, last year. 

Deal Grades:
Fox: A
Roku: B+

Opinion: If anyone was questioning whether Roku is an ad company, and not a hardware company, question no more. Fox makes its money off ads and it’s buying Roku to make even more money off ads.

How? Well the obvious stuff is acquiring more ad inventory, more ad salespeople, and more ad infrastructure. The less obvious stuff is cross-pollinating data across both Fox and Roku to increase the value of all the inventory (remember Roku has the highest CTV device penetration in the US and thus the largest CTV household ID graph), cross-selling Fox inventory to Roku’s SMB and mid-market customers, hedging the decline of their linear business with more CTV growth, modernizing their talent and tech for the streaming and digital era, and diversifying their ad business outside of their O&O inventory by becoming a distribution gatekeeper of third-party streaming apps. Fox now controls what 100M+ households see when they turn on their TV. A major point of leverage is the Roku home screen. And every streaming service that wants distribution has to negotiate with Fox now. 

If you squint hard enough, this moves Fox from the streamer category to the walled garden category. And it “skips over” pure-play OEMs (e.g. Samsung, LG) as it makes the leap. Fox now owns hardware, data, inventory, and ad tech. Which would put it in competition with the Googles and Amazons of the world. And given its CTV focus, Fox could claim that it's the only specialized CTV walled garden in the space. With all its assets, Fox would create tons of leverage in the marketplace and significant network effects. Good position to be in. Now they have to execute.

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