With Fox set to acquire Roku for $22 billion, the company will also own the top two free, ad-supported streaming players.
Fox owns Tubi, which captured 2.2 percent of all TV viewing in the U.S. in March, while the Roku Channel captured 3 percent, according to the latest Nielsen Gauge, putting it just under Amazon’s Prime Video. At the moment, Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of the Fox Corporation, said the plan is to keep the two services operating separately, while noting the power of owning the two services.
“If you look at Tubi and the Roku channel together, they are incredibly complementary services,” Murdoch said on an investor call Monday. “There’s about a third overlap between the audience, between the two of them, so that they’re not identical audiences. Bringing the two of them together, you know, effectively , triples the reach of the combined service.”
“It’s too early to say, but our expectation is fully that you keep the services separate. They serve consumers and our viewers in different ways,” he continued.
The power, as noted by Roku CEO Anthony Wood, is primarily in creating an even larger ad platform for the combined business.
