Fox Agrees to Keep Roku Open to Rivals in Justice Department Greenlight

Logo text The Justice Department’s clearance of Fox Corp.’s $22 billion acquisition of Roku is coming with concessions. As part of its agreement with the competition regulators, Fox said it would remain open to rivals, according to the Justice Department. The company will continue carrying non-Fox movies and TV shows for at least three years, ensure competing services aren’t pushed down in search results or denied prominent placement on home screens and make audience data available to third parties. It also agreed to maintain safeguards preventing it from sharing sensitive information about rival content providers, including data on what users search for, watch and click until at least 2029. Fox on Friday closed the deal, creating a new power player in media and streaming. The deal catapults the company into a major player, with two of the largest free streaming video platforms in Tubi and Roku and a premium streaming service in Fox One. And through Roku, it gains control of a behemoth distribution platform through which millions of households access TV, including applications operated by competitors like Netflix, YouTube and Disney+. In its investigation, the Justice Department concluded that the deal is “not likely to result in harm to competition” in free, ad-supported streaming. “Additionally, the investigation found that, because Roku relies on a broad offering of content from many providers to attract consumers, the merged firm would suffer monetary and reputational harm if it attempted to use the Roku platform to harm FOX’s content rivals,” the Justice Department said. The transaction gives Fox major sway over how audiences discover and access content. Roku’s operating system powers its own streaming devices and is built into TVs. Its home screen is the gateway to those services for a significant chunk of the United States: Viewers use it to find apps, search for programming and, perhaps most important, decide what to watch. The megamerger has been more than a year in the making, though the deal closed in just five months.