Fox Corp. has agreed to acquire Roku in a deal valued at $22 billion, a purchase that vaults the combined company to No. 3 among television players by share of viewing. Roku’s platform reaches more than 100 million households, over half of them in the United States. Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher advised Roku; FGS Global advised Fox.
Under the terms, Fox will pay $160 per share for Roku, split as $96.00 in cash and 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A common stock. That values Roku at about $22 billion in enterprise value. Fox has lined up $12 billion in committed bridge financing from Morgan Stanley and expects to own about 73% of the combined company, with Roku holders taking the remaining 27%. The deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027.
For Fox, the purchase reads as the culmination of a decade of narrowing. After spinning off its entertainment assets to Disney in 2019, the company kept live sports and news and stayed deliberately lean. Buying Roku ends that restraint. The company is trading a focused programming bundle for control of the platform that carries its content into American living rooms.
CEO Lachlan Murdoch cast the move in exactly those terms. He called the deal “a defining moment for Fox and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decade.”
The addition of Roku shifts Fox’s business mix toward high-growth streaming and connected TV while keeping a balance across its advertising and distribution operations. Pairing Fox’s sports, news and entertainment content with Roku’s connected-TV reach gives the company both the programming and the pipes, a combination the traditional networks have struggled to assemble as audiences migrate from cable. Fox already owns Tubi, the free ad-supported streaming service, and folding in Roku’s platform and its channel gives the company a much larger owned-and-operated stage for that advertising business.
Roku’s founder, Anthony Wood, signed an agreement to support the deal and will join the Fox board of directors once it closes.
FGS Global (John Christiansen, Kerry Golds, Jeff Huber and Noelle Amos) represented Fox, while Joele Frank, Wilkinson Brimmer Katcher (Jed Repko, Joseph Sala and Allison Sobel) handled Roku.
Connected TV has become the arena where content owners and platform operators are colliding, and Fox has chosen to own both sides of that equation rather than rent one. The combined company will carry more debt and a far larger technology footprint than the disciplined Fox of recent years. The company that spent years shedding assets is now buying one of the largest in its history, a reversal that will test how well a programmer can run a technology platform. Whether the trade pays off depends on how many of those 100 million households Fox can turn into paying, watching, ad-supported audiences.