Fox to buy Roku in $22 billion cash-and-stock deal

Fox Corp. is moving to own both the content and the gateway. The company said it will acquire Roku for $160.00 per share in a cash-and-stock transaction that values the streaming platform at about $22 billion in enterprise value, bringing Fox’s sports, news and entertainment businesses together with Roku’s connected TV platform, The Roku Channel and first-party data.

Fox and Roku said the combined company would become the third-largest player in U.S. television by share of viewing. That makes the deal more than a traditional acquisition: it gives Fox a deeper foothold in the part of television that increasingly decides who controls distribution, advertising and audience data as viewing shifts from cable to streaming.

Roku’s scale explains the appeal. The company said it had more than 100 million global streaming households, and its first-quarter 2026 advertising revenue reached $613 million, up 27% from a year earlier. For Fox, that audience offers a direct path into connected TV advertising at a time when marketers are moving budgets toward targeted digital video rather than linear TV. Fox said the acquisition fit its strategy, which shifted in 2019 toward live news and sports and expanded with the 2020 purchase of Tubi.

The companies said they intended to keep Roku operating as an open, partner-friendly platform, a signal aimed at advertisers, content distributors and rivals who may worry that Fox would use the deal to tilt streaming economics in its favor. CNBC reported that existing Fox shareholders were expected to own about 73% of the combined company, with Roku shareholders holding about 27%. The companies said they expected the deal to close in the first half of calendar year 2027.

Fox also said its shareholder capital return program would continue uninterrupted and that it expected to maintain its investment-grade rating, trying to reassure investors that the transaction would not derail its balance sheet. Still, the combination is likely to draw attention from regulators and competitors because it would put premium programming, ad inventory and a major television platform under one roof. In an industry where data and distribution now matter as much as the shows themselves, Fox is betting that scale will matter more than separation.