CTV / M&A
The Murdochs just turned a bet most analysts mocked into the biggest streaming deal of the year. Here's the playbook, and why they sold their Roku stake to fund Tubi, then bought Roku back for 50x more.
Fox's 2020 acquisition of Tubi for $440 million was one of the most mocked deals in media that year. The streaming wars were at full intensity. Netflix was spending $17 billion on content. Disney had just launched Disney+. And Fox, fresh off selling most of its entertainment assets to Disney, was betting on a free ad-supported service that most analysts described as a niche player for B-movie bingers.
What the skeptics missed was the underlying theory. Fox's core business, live sports and news, generates viewers who don't need a subscription stack. They need a place to watch everything else for free. Tubi, with no content production costs and a licensing model, was that place. Fox wasn't competing with Netflix for the prestige subscriber. It was building the platform for the viewer Netflix never wanted.
Tubi's numbers proved the bet before anyone gave Fox credit for making it. Revenue approaching $1.5 billion in fiscal 2026. More than 100 million monthly active users. 13 billion hours of content consumed annually. Those metrics don't emerge from a niche acquisition. They emerge from a strategy that understood where ad dollars were moving before the rest of the industry did.
Fox didn't buy Roku to get into the hardware business. It bought Roku to own the relationship between the viewer and the advertiser, and to make that relationship impossible to disintermediate.
The Roku acquisition announced today closes the loop. Fox sold its Roku stake in 2020 to fund the Tubi deal, betting it could generate more value by owning the content on the platform than by owning equity in the platform itself. That bet worked. Now Fox is buying the platform, because the combination of Tubi's inventory, Fox's sports and news audiences, and Roku's 44 percent share of connected TV viewing hours creates a targeting and measurement capability that no pure-play streaming service can match.
The deeper ad tech story is what most coverage is missing. Roku's data on viewing behavior is unparalleled. They know what you watch, when you switch, what you skip, and what you complete. Married to Fox's live sports audiences, who are among the most valuable in advertising, that data creates a story about attention and intent that programmatic buyers have been trying to buy for a decade. Fox just built it.
Full interactive version: leftover.io/article/0 — left-over covers what happens after the press release.