What Fox and Roku aren’t telling us yet

Fox and Roku are about to enter uncharted territory together. On Monday, Fox announced that it will spend $22 billion to acquire Roku, whose smart TVs and streaming players are in 100 million homes worldwide. If the deal goes through in 2027 as expected, it’ll be the first instance of a major media company having full control over a major streaming TV platform. While the two companies obviously see this as great news for them and their shareholders, they’ve left a lot of questions unanswered about what the deal means for Roku, its business, and its users. Here are a few that come to mind: What becomes of Howdy and Frndly TV? Roku’s two subscription streaming services have seemed more like side bets than core strategic pieces, which makes me wonder about their future under Fox. Howdy is the more interesting of the two, in many ways resembling Netflix in its earliest years as a fledgling ad-free streamer. The catalog of movies and shows is small and largely forgettable, but it’s been building up thanks to recent licensing deals with Disney, Sony, and Warner Bros. Discovery, and the market data firm Antenna estimates that Howdy now has more than 1 million subscribers. Will Roku continue to invest in the service under Fox, and will Fox’s rivals continue to see it as harmless source of revenue from their back catalogs? As for Frndly TV, Roku itself acquired this low-cost, rerun-centric live TV streaming service for $185 million last year. At the time, I thought Roku would try to expand the lineup and gain a bigger foothold in pay TV packaging. That hasn’t happened, and while Roku pushes Frndly TV aggressively on its home screen, it remains a niche service whose main draw is the Hallmark Channel. Does Fox really want to be a pay TV distributor itself, and if so, does this pave the way for a Frndly TV bundle that includes Fox channels? Is Roku’s reach a bargaining chip now? Fox and Roku say they’re committed to running Roku a