Fox Buys Roku for $22 Billion: What It Means For UK Users

Fox is buying Roku. The company behind the streaming sticks, smart TVs and brand-new projectors that have been turning up across the UK has agreed to be bought by Fox Corporation – the US news and sports giant run by Lachlan Murdoch, son of Rupert – in a deal worth around $22 billion (roughly £16 billion).

The two companies announced the agreement today, and Fox is paying $160 per share in a mix of cash and stock. Murdoch called it a “defining moment” for Fox, and on paper it’s easy to see why: it pairs the biggest name in American live sport and news with one of the biggest streaming platforms in the world, reaching more than 100 million households.

Roku’s founder and chief executive, Anthony Wood, will stay on and take a seat on the Fox board once the deal goes through.

Both companies’ boards have approved it unanimously. The combined business would become the third-largest player in US television by share of viewing – sitting alongside Fox’s existing free streamer, Tubi.

So that’s the headline. The more useful question, and the one I’m already getting emails about from UK readers, is what any of this means if you’ve got a Roku stick plugged into your telly, or a Roku TV in the living room.

The short version: not much, and not for a long time. But it’s worth unpacking why – and where things could head later on.

A Quick Word on Roku

Roku might not be a household name in the UK in the way Amazon’s Fire TV is, but it’s a major one. In the US, Canada and Mexico it’s the number one streaming platform by hours watched, and it’s been steadily building up its UK presence for a few years now.

Over here, Roku sells three streaming sticks: the entry-level Streaming Stick (HD) at £29.99, the Streaming Stick Plus with 4K at £39.99 – currently our pick for the best streaming device in the UK – and the older Streaming Stick 4K with Dolby Vision at £49.99.

They plug into your TV’s HDMI port and give you Netflix, Disney+, iPlayer, ITVX and the rest, all wrapped in Roku’s famously clean, simple interface.

On top of that, Roku’s operating system is built into smart TVs from brands like Sharp, Hisense, JVC and TCL, and the company has just moved into projectors too, with the Aurzen D1R and the Sharp H272.

In other words, there’s a decent chance some Roku kit has made its way into your home – which is exactly why the Fox news has people wondering.

Will This Change Your Roku TV or Stick?

In the short term, no. Nothing at all.

Deals of this size don’t happen overnight. This one isn’t expected to close until the first half of 2027, and even that depends on getting the green light from regulators and shareholders on both sides.

Until it actually completes, Fox and Roku remain entirely separate companies, and your device carries on exactly as it did yesterday.

And even once it’s done, big companies tend to move slowly. Buying a business and then reshaping how its products work are two very different timelines.

So if you’re picturing your Roku home screen suddenly sprouting a Fox News logo next week, you can relax. That’s not how this goes.

The interesting questions are the longer-term ones – and there are a couple worth thinking about.

The Adverts Question

Here’s something a lot of people don’t realise about Roku: it’s an advertising company at least as much as it’s a hardware one.

Yes, it sells you a stick or a TV. But that’s not where the money is. Over the past year, Roku made about $5 billion in revenue – and devices accounted for just 11% of that.

Advertising made up nearly half, with subscriptions covering most of the rest. Roku’s real business is the data, the adverts and the promotions it can serve across all those millions of viewers.

Now look at who’s buying it. Fox is, first and foremost, an advertising business, and its pitch to investors for this deal leans heavily on one idea: that Roku’s home screen, its viewer data and its ad inventory are the prize.

One of the named goals is, in Fox’s own words, to “accelerate the advertising engine.”

That matters because Roku has just rebuilt the very thing in question. We wrote recently about Roku tearing up its home screen for the first time in over a decade – swapping the simple grid of app icons for rows of personalised recommendations.

Roku insisted those recommendation tiles aren’t for sale to advertisers. But the redesign was widely read as setting Roku up for more ad opportunities, and it’s precisely the asset Fox is now buying.

None of this means your Roku is about to drown in adverts. There’s still an off switch buried in the settings to bring back the old-style layout, and nothing changes until the deal closes anyway.

But a platform that already earns half its money from ads, now owned by a company whose stated plan is to push that engine harder, is a fair thing to keep an eye on.

Will Fox Treat the UK Any Better Than Roku Has?

For all that Roku is a giant in America, the UK has always felt a bit like a second-tier market for it. We get the sticks, and we get the updates – but often late, and sometimes not at all.

That home screen overhaul I mentioned? Rolling out in the US first, with no UK date confirmed. Some Roku hardware, like the high-end Roku Ultra, has never crossed the Atlantic.

And The Roku Channel, which is a serious destination in the US with premium films and paid add-on channels, is a fairly minor affair over here.

The pattern tends to go in waves. Every couple of years Roku pushes hard in the UK – new sticks, now the Football Zone for the World Cup, and the projectors – before going quiet again for a while. The current burst of activity is the latest of those, but not necessarily a permanent change of gear.

And now Roku is being bought by a company that is, if anything, even more US-focused. Which brings us neatly to Tubi.

Fox already owns Tubi, the free ad-supported streamer, and it’s the one part of the Fox empire that’s actually made it into UK living rooms.

Tubi vanished from Britain for six years before returning in 2024, and while it’s been adding content steadily, the UK library is still a pale imitation of the American one – heavy on films and shows you’ve never heard of, with the recognisable titles very much the exception.

It’s the same story as so many ad-supported free services on this side of the pond.

There’s a neat irony in all this, by the way: you can already watch Tubi on a Roku device in the UK. So Fox is buying the platform that a chunk of its own UK audience already uses to watch its other UK product.

Which leaves the open question. Does being swallowed by another very American company mean more of the same for UK viewers – late updates, thinner libraries, the UK as an afterthought?

Or could a bigger, better-funded Fox-plus-Roku decide the UK is worth taking more seriously? Honestly, it could go either way, and anyone telling you they know for certain is guessing.

And What About Freely?

One last thread worth pulling. I’ve been asking Roku for a while now about better live TV integration in the UK – and specifically about Freely, the broadband-delivered successor to Freeview that’s already built into some Roku TVs but absent from the sticks and projectors.

Roku’s answer, when I last put it to them, was measured but not dismissive.

A Fox-owned Roku could cut either way here. Fox’s whole identity is built on live sport and news, so you could argue a new owner that thinks in terms of live TV might be more inclined to invest in the plumbing that makes broadcast channels work properly on a streaming device.

Or you could argue that all of Fox’s live energy is pointed firmly at American football and US news, and UK broadcaster integration slips even further down the list. We’ll find out in time.

For now, though, the practical takeaway is the simple one. If you own a Roku device, nothing changes today, tomorrow, or for a good while yet.

The rest is a story we’ll be watching closely – and one that says as much about how the US giants see the UK as it does about Fox and Roku themselves.

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