With Fox set to acquire Roku for $22 billion, the company will also own the top two free, ad-supported streaming players.
Fox owns Tubi, which captured 2.2 percent of all TV viewing in the U.S. in March, while the Roku Channel captured 3 percent, according to the latest Nielsen Gauge, putting it just under Amazon’s Prime Video. At the moment, Lachlan Murdoch, CEO of the Fox Corporation, said the plan is to keep the two services operating separately, while noting the power of owning the two services.
“If you look at Tubi and the Roku channel together, they are incredibly complementary services,” Murdoch said on an investor call Monday. “There’s about a third overlap between the audience, between the two of them, so that they’re not identical audiences. Bringing the two of them together, you know, effectively , triples the reach of the combined service.”
“It’s too early to say, but our expectation is fully that you keep the services separate. They serve consumers and our viewers in different ways,” he continued.
The power, as noted by Roku CEO Anthony Wood, is primarily in creating an even larger ad platform for the combined business.
“The combination of the Roku Channel, our ad inventory that we have distributed through the platform and Tubi creates an extremely large and scaled ad platform, and then a combination of the data and the ad tech,” Wood said on the call. “I think that’s obviously going to be incredibly helpful for our business.”
One of the key differences between the two services is the fact that the majority of content on Tubi is video-on-demand, while Roku is primarily made up of FAST channels. Additionally, the Roku Channel is largely used while on Roku, while Tubi is available widely. Roku is also the owner of the $2.99 monthly subscription service Howdy, which the company has said has been quickly gaining traction
Tubi has also leaned into producing some of its own original content as it leans into specific genres and programming that appeal to its younger and more multicultural audience, while the Roku Channel has shifted gears on originals, after releasing its big feature film, Weird: The Al Yankovic Story in 2022, to focus more on creating content around big sporting and holiday events.