How Roku became way more important than you realize
Hello again from Fast Company and welcome back to Plugged In. Last Friday, Reuters’ Echo Wang, Milana Vinn, and Dawn Chmielewski reported that Roku, the maker of the dominant streaming platform for TVs, was exploring its strategic options, including selling itself. That exploration didn’t take long. On Monday, news broke that Fox Corp. would acquire the company for $22 billion, a transaction expected to close in the first half of next year. Best known for its eponymous news and sports cable operations, Fox already owns the free streaming service Tubi. Adding Roku would turn the company into a significantly bigger force in TV—the third- or fourth-largest provider by audience share, depending on whether the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger is consummated. Roku offers apps for every major streaming service plus its own service, the Roku Channel, which is not a single free channel but more than 500 of them. Fox says it intends to preserve this openness, and that Roku founder and CEO Anthony Wood will assume an unspecified “ongoing role” at the combined operation. It’s tough to imagine the company being misguided enough to tamper with Roku’s brand, whose long-standing association with easy streaming is one of the assets Fox is buying. Assuming the deal gets done, it’s entirely possible that from the outside, there will be no glaring signs that Roku has been sucked into the Murdoch machine. Still, it would mark the end of an era. Fox—or any old-school media giant—could never have built anything resembling Roku on its own. Even in Silicon Valley, it’s a unique, improbable success story. I can’t think of another that’s even roughly comparable. The company’s origins are so thoroughly forgotten that even its own account of its history memory-holes most of them. Back in the 1990s, Wood had founded ReplayTV, which launched a digital video recorder in 1997. I was totally smitten with mine, and still think it was superior to TiVo, which debuted at the same trade s