I have been talking for years now about the death of cable, which has functionally arrived even if the cable networks don’t quite know it yet. The Pew Research Center estimates that cable and satellite TV households were down to only 36 percent of the population in 2025; that number was 85 percent just a decade earlier. Among viewers under 30, cable subscriptions are at 16 percent of households. Streaming represents nearly half of all viewing among all age groups. Cable is a dying medium, and it’s a matter of time before it’s no longer cost-efficient to maintain cable systems, and they are shut down. Charter Communications is trying to grow its way to survival with the acquisition of Cox, but even the biggest cable companies can’t outrun reality forever.
That represents an existential threat for cable networks already struggling with dramatic losses in advertising revenue (except for sports and news, which we’ll get to). Entertainment plays on cable are simply over, with all that value moving to streaming. If and when cable companies pack up the cords, the question becomes whether any cable stations will have a distribution home.
That’s what’s behind Fox’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku on Monday. The deal gives Fox’s cable stations—which after a sale to Disney are really only news and sports channels—a landing spot with Roku’s 100 million customers. It also combines two of the largest free streaming sites, Tubi and Roku TV, which have recreated the once-ubiquitous presence of rerun-heavy TV for a new generation. And it gives Fox a foothold in the sophisticated world of surveillance advertising, endlessly tracking the preferences of viewers and controlling their experiences.
Between this and Paramount’s proposed $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, which the U.S. Justice Department approved last Friday, the two most ideologically conservative media moguls in America are setting themselves up for the post-cable future by rolling up huge oligopolies, insulated from competition. Antitrust regulators in the states now have another instance of MAGA media consolidation to contend with.
ROKU’S “CONNECTED TV” SERVICE HAS EMERGED as a customer-friendly solution to the rapid changes in the television landscape. Its main innovation is a stick that converts any dumb monitor into a smart TV, and it has reached over 100 million households globally, including half of all U.S. homes with broadband internet. Roku also sells streaming subscriptions directly from its home screen.
Ironically, Roku has become essentially the cable box of the 21st century. Thirty years of supposed innovation in media technology, and in many ways we are back where we started, if not worse. The deal gives Fox control of that box, enabling it to set rules for competitors on the service.
Fox One, the direct-to-consumer, $19.99-a-month service for all Fox offerings—from the Fox Broadcasting Network to its news and sports cable channels—will at the very least get prime shelf space on Roku if the merger passes. Fox could even dissolve Fox One or bundle it free with Roku sticks, just for the distribution. That would reinvent Fox One as a free ad-supported television (FAST) service, among the fastest-growing revenue-gainers in media.
Tubi, the Fox-owned FAST channel that mostly offers reruns for always-on binge viewing, has been an advertising juggernaut for the company, and has gradually developed some original programming with podcast studios and others. Roku has a similar suite of primarily FAST channels, including Roku TV, Howdy, and Frndly TV. These could all fit together into a mega-FAST channel with occasional original shows.
People gravitate to these unbelievably cheap-to-produce (all you have to do is acquire old programming) free channels as a modern update to the local channels that showed reruns all day. Fox’s broadcast programs and its sports and news channels are considerably more expensive to produce, but they can charge premium ad rates. Plus, Roku’s 100-million-strong audience solves the existential threat to Fox programming from a cable apocalypse. Before the Roku announcement, Fox did not have a streaming companion with any scale, unlike Comcast (Peacock), Disney (Hulu, Disney+), Warner Bros. (HBO Max), or Paramount (Paramount+); but also unlike most of these rivals, Fox has no useless entertainment-based cable channels dragging them down. Shifting to pure ad support can work for live, in-the-moment programming like news and sports.
Overall, a Fox-Roku team-up would have the third-largest audience in television across all platforms, behind YouTube and Disney. (A successful Paramount-WBD merger would drop Fox to fourth.) Unique among TV or film studios, it would also give Fox a mammoth trove of data.
Roku tracks viewing habits among its 100 million customers; Fox would know how often people are watching Netflix, Apple TV, HBO Max, or anyone else. Roku also persistently serves targeted ads across its platform. As this PowerPoint presentation about Roku’s partnership with mega-advertising firm Omnicom explains, Roku leverages browsing moments when people are deciding what to watch and stuffs ads into the home screen, which can be adapted to individual viewers. Even the animation that plays on Roku when a program is paused has targeted ads in it. These become additional spaces for Fox to dump in ads, including for its own products.
Consultant Madison & Wall estimates that the combined Fox-Roku company would capture 1 out of every 7 U.S. television advertising dollars, with an even higher percentage for streaming. The combined company would generate $9 billion in annual ad revenue. Judging from Monday’s investor presentation, Fox sees Roku’s “Leading Advertising and Subscription Monetization Engines” as a key element of the deal.
Of course, Rupert Murdoch would likely take massive losses on Fox News if it meant he kept its dominance over the political system. Teaming with Roku gives Fox News a life raft if cable goes under that competitors like One America News, NewsNation, Newsmax, and MS NOW don’t have. After Comcast split off its cable channels from NBC, MS NOW is in the hands of Versant, without major studio backing.
All these news companies, plus streamers like Netflix and Hulu, will have to negotiate with Fox for carriage on Roku. While Fox said in its announcement that Roku would remain “an open, partner-friendly platform,” it would have incentives to preference Fox programming. Fox News was a crown jewel for cable; now, by owning the post-cable home screen, it could demote the competition below the fold.
IN OTHER WORDS, FOX NEWS COULD EMERGE from this shake-up stronger than ever, after an uncertain post-cable future. Its main competition would potentially be a Fox News-lite CNN under David Ellison’s control as part of a merged Paramount-Warner Bros.
A bulked-up Paramount would be a more unwieldy product, with bloated cable channels and less control of distribution. But it has powerful friends in government—the UFC White House bouts were exclusively shown on Paramount+—and though it appears to be rapidly burning its credibility with CBS News viewers, its audience is likely big enough to withstand the hit.
So you have two families, the Murdochs and the Ellisons, that could hold some of the biggest entities for broadcast media production and distribution, able to punish competitors and purify their channels with regime-accepted content. The controlling potentates of modern media would be able to fit in a small room—in fact, they will all be in a small room when they meet up at the annual Allen & Co. media and tech retreat in Sun Valley, Idaho, next month. And most of them would need the Murdochs’ assent to keep their content flowing.
That cultural and ideological control, while perhaps not justiciable in an antitrust case (though alleged promises by Ellison to fire Trump’s most hated CNN anchors in exchange for merger clearance has triggered a demand for company records), is perhaps the most dangerous result of a consolidation that will dictate what an allegedly free society gets to see and hear. These deals will also affect consumer prices, creator wages, digital innovation, and a host of other matters that actually are justiciable in an antitrust case.
The Justice Department waved through the Paramount acquisition and even submitted a rare statement describing its analysis—an incomplete one because it only glanced at the impacts on content producers—in an attempt to push back state enforcers from mounting their own challenge. Reporting has since uncovered that career officials were leaning toward blocking the merger themselves, but senior staff cleared it before they could make a recommendation.
David Ellison literally held a banquet for Donald Trump in April and a televised spectacle on the White House South Lawn two days after this Justice Department analysis. It’s not a stretch to see the Justice Department action as corrupt special pleading on behalf of a political ally.
I don’t expect that to persuade state AGs like California’s Rob Bonta, who immediately said that the Paramount merger is “not a done deal” after the Justice Department announcement. But now they have another problem. The Fox-Roku merger is a vertical integration of connected TV with a major TV producer. There are similar issues around narrowing outlets for producers, but there are additional considerations, like foreclosing access to competing networks.
Unfortunately for these overworked and underresourced state enforcers, the consolidation isn’t stopping under Trump. The Fox-Roku deal, like Paramount-Warner Bros., concentrates power and information in the hands of partisan gatekeepers, and has massive implications for a Hollywood that’s already reeling.
