The marriage of content and distribution has been a recurring fantasy on Madison Avenue and in Hollywood for decades, the kind of deal that looks elegant on a whiteboard and proves considerably messier in execution. Now Fox and Roku are preparing to test the theory once more.
Fox announced on Monday that it would spend $22 billion to acquire Roku, the streaming platform whose devices and smart televisions have found their way into 100 million homes around the world. If the transaction closes in 2027 as the companies expect, it would represent the first time a major media company has owned outright a major streaming television platform — a vertical integration that antitrust regulators once frowned upon and that the industry has lately been too fragmented to attempt.
The two companies, naturally, presented the deal as a happy occasion for shareholders and viewers alike. What they did not present was much detail about how the combined enterprise would actually operate.
Among the questions left conspicuously unaddressed: What becomes of Roku's two subscription streaming services, Howdy and Frndly TV? Neither has ever seemed central to Roku's identity — they have had the quality of experiments conducted by a company that was not entirely sure what it wanted to be when it grew up — and their fate under Fox's ownership remains unclear.
(One imagines the strategic planning meetings in which someone asks, "But what do we do with Frndly?" and the room falls silent.)
There are larger questions, too, about whether Fox intends to favor its own programming on Roku's platform, and whether rival media companies will view the arrangement with the same equanimity they bring to distributing their content through a neutral party.
For now, the deal exists mostly as an announcement and a price tag. The details, as they say in the streaming business, will be available later.
Original story published in Fast Company: "What Fox and Roku aren't telling us yet"