The Justice Department issued a statement on its clearance of Fox Corp.‘s $22 billion aquisition of Roku, concluding that the transaction was “not likely to result in harm to competition.”
In a statement, the Antitrust Division said that they concluded that the concluded that the “entry of free, ad-supported streaming providers would be timely, likely, and sufficient to make a substantial risk of harm to competition unlikely. 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. If the merged firm were to degrade the Roku platform, consumers could switch to other connected TV platforms.”
The closing of the transaction was announced earlier on Friday, less than five months after the deal was proposed last June – well ahead of the initially projected window of the first half of 2027.
Per the DOJ, Fox committed that Roku would “remain an open and neutral content partner post-merger.”
Along with Amazon Fire, Roku is a leading gateway to streaming, declaring last April that it reaches 100 million households globally. The company works with a wide range of programmers, which casts Fox in an influential role with its rivals on the content side. The merger in some ways is a dramatic acceleration of the existing trend of streaming services becoming more like third-party distribution platforms. Flagship streamer Fox One, for example, has done bundle deals with ESPN and has ambitions to onboard more services as it grows.
Commitments that Fox made to the DOJ included continuing to carry non-Fox content on Roku for a period of at least three years, not discriminating against non-Fox content in search results, and allowing users to reconfigure applications on the home screen. Fox also will continue to provide date products to third parties on “commercially reasonable terms” and consistent with Roku’s standard distribution agreement, the DOJ said.
The Antitrust Division also said that Fox “will maintain existing contractual firewall commitments to content partners for competitively sensitive non-Fox content data, including aggregated and non-aggregated data that can be inferred from, or collected through, commercial activities of non-Fox content providers or their uses on Roku products, including click, search, view, and voice data for a period of at least 3 years.”
Dade Hayes contributed to this report.
Leave a Reply