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Fox Buys Roku: Is It The Infrastructure That Wins the AI Ad War?
While studios struggle to adapt to generative AI, Fox bought the data.
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This morning Fox Corporation emerged as the acquirer of Roku for $22 billion, only a few days after the connected-TV and advertising platform was rumored to be for sale.
There is an obvious streaming angle to this—Fox has already had success with the free, ad-supported platform Tubi. It surpassed $1 billion in revenue for the first time in FY 2025 and now comprises 23% of Fox’s total advertising business. According to Nielsen’s most recent The Gauge, it is the second most-watched free-streaming service in the U.S., behind only The Roku Channel. Acquiring Roku is doubling-down on that business and boosting Fox’s share of U.S. TV consumption by platform from 2.2% to 5.2%, which would equal Disney’s current share across three apps and compete for third place behind Netflix.
There is also an obvious U.S. advertising angle to this: Combining Roku with Fox’s broadcast and cable networks—and Tubi—would give them the third-largest share of U.S. television viewership by distributor(10.2% as of March 2026), behind only Disney (10.6%) and YouTube (13.2%). Fox will be able to offer advertisers competitive scale and sophisticated ad-targeting.
There is a less obvious generative AI marketplace angle to this. For the past two years I have been researching and analyzing how and why AI restructures who captures value in entertainment. My answer has been: whoever owns both the content and the infrastructure (The Ellisons controlling Paramount Skydance and Oracle, Amazon owning MGM Studios). Fox will own two key points of infrastructure:
100 million connected TV households worldwide using a Roku streaming player, a first-party Roku-made TV, or “one of the many Roku TV models built by” its global hardware partners
Roku’s advertising platform and Operating System which enables them to capture revenues from digital advertising and distribution of third-party streaming services
But what business will a combined Fox and Roku be in when the streaming model is hitting headwinds, and generative AI creators are more incentivized to produce content for consumers via advertising than original content?
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Past essays related to today’s analysis:
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