Your Roku is about to belong to Fox, and you didn't get a vote
The $22 billion deal cleared its shareholder votes this week. The comment sections under the news are not about the stock.
On October 14, shareholders of both companies approved Fox's $22 billion all-stock acquisition of Roku. The vote wasn't close: preliminary tallies show about 197.4 million Fox Class B shares in favor and 71,891 against. At closing, expected in the first half of 2027, Roku stockholders will own roughly 27 percent of Fox, and the combined company becomes the third-largest video distributor in the US, behind only YouTube and the merged Paramount–Warner Bros. Discovery.
Lachlan Murdoch called it a "transformative transaction" pairing Fox's live sports and news with Roku's distribution platform. The people the platform actually distributes to are reading the same news differently:
"Time replace my Roku TV"
— a commenter on r/television (8 upvotes)
For some of them, the deal is less a reason to leave than the final push after years of drifting:
"Roku's been kinda mid for a good while now anyway. This def cinches it."
— a commenter on r/television (7 upvotes)
The scale of that grumbling is the story. Roku reaches more than 100 million streaming households and says its platform is in over half of American broadband homes; for all those living rooms, this deal isn't a line in the trades, it's a change of ownership of the first screen their TV shows them. The company deciding what appears on that home screen now also owns Fox News, Fox Sports, Tubi with its 110 million monthly users, and the Fox One streaming service — a content owner with obvious preferences, holding the front door.
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What actually changes, and when
Nothing immediately. The deal still needs to clear regulators, and that part is not a formality: in September, the Justice Department issued a "second request" for information, the procedural step that signals a serious antitrust review and stretches the timeline. Until it closes, Roku runs as before.
The reasonable worry is about after. Roku built its market share as the neutral shelf — the platform that didn't care whether you opened Netflix, YouTube or Tubi, because it sold the shelf space to all of them equally. Fox is buying the shelf precisely because it isn't neutral: Murdoch's stated logic is pushing Fox content through Roku's pipes. Nielsen's July numbers show why — Fox properties plus The Roku Channel and Tubi together already account for over 12 percent of all US TV viewing, before any integration.
197 million shares voted on the deal. The 100 million households that look at a Roku home screen found out from the news.
Whether the switching threats turn into actual switched TVs is a 2027 question, and angry comment sections have a long history of not canceling anything. But Roku's entire pitch to those households was that the remote worked for them. Starting next year, it reports to a media company — and the viewers planning their exit are reacting to exactly that.
Previously we wrote: If you love DC and HBO, Skydance's 25% stock crash is your problem too