The Roku/Tubi Powerhouse
A recent industry development worth flagging is Fox's approximately $22 billion agreement to acquire Roku. The market's initial reaction was unkind: Fox shares fell about 17% on the announcement, driven by the sticker shock of the price implying ~52x Roku's trailing EBITDA, funded in part with $12 billion of new debt. We believe the deal’s industrial logic is sound and creates interesting optionality for Fox.
Closer to home for our activities, we are focused on the implications stemming from the integration of Roku’s and the Fox-owned Tubi’s free ad-supported streaming services, the latter of which has become the “quiet giant” of long-tail film and television rights monetization.
Fox bought Tubi for $440 million in 2020. It has since become one of the largest engines in media for exploiting back catalogs of older films, syndicated series and library titles that “premium” streamers treat as filler. Tubi crossed 100 million monthly active users in 2025 and has been consistently climbing the ranks of streaming watch time market share, overtaking Paramount+, Peacock, and HBO Max. Within some of the libraries that we oversee, revenue from Tubi represents up to 25% of total.
Roku accounts for roughly half of all U.S. streaming activity today, with 125 million people passing through its home-screen every day. The business has become a meaningful gatekeeper and driver of content discovery, while its own ad-supported channel commanded even more streaming viewership time than Tubi, per Nielsen’s latest reporting.
By some estimates, the strategic combination of Tubi and Roku Channel would represent about 16% of U.S. streaming ad revenue and put its watch time market share ahead of Disney/ESPN/Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. A platform of that scale becomes a far more attractive proposition to advertisers, which should in turn drive additional revenue to content suppliers.
Naturally, with growing platform power comes an obvious risk: could the economics to rightsholders get worse despite a growing revenue pie? Beyond potential changes to take rates, Roku’s control of the home screen gives the platform more ability to make editorial or algorithmic changes to content discovery. However, the market remains fragmented and non-exclusive licensing across other similar ad-supported platforms (Pluto, Samsung, Amazon, LG, Plex, etc) should provide for a floor to earnings. In all library underwriting, sensitivity analyses around platform concentration must remain a critical workflow.