FOX Buys Roku for $22 Billion

[00:00:00]One of the largest TV companies on the planet just bought the TV sitting in your living room. And no, I'm not being dramatic. Fox Corporation has agreed to buy Roku for about $160 a share, which is roughly 22 billion in total. Now, the headline is a $22 billion deal, but honestly, that's not the part that should worry you. The part that should worry you is what they actually bought, and we'll get to that because it's a bit grim. On paper, it makes the combined company the third largest player in US TV by viewership. They're folding in Fox Sports and News, the Tubi streaming service, and the Roku Channel into one box, and that box already lives in over 100 million households worldwide. The single most valuable thing Roku owns isn't the hardware, it's your data.

[00:00:40]Roku, like Samsung, LG, and all smart TV manufacturers, have this tech called ACR that quietly fingerprints what you watch and packages it up for advertisers. ACR literally screenshots what you're watching and uploads images back to the manufacturer. That's already why your home screen serves you targeted ads, including political ones in an election year. Now, a mega corporation owns the data pipe and the news channel and the ad space. The content, the platform, and the profile of the person watching all under one owner. We are speedrunning Cyberpunk 2077, just with worse graphics and a subscription fee. Give it 5 years, and your screen is going to ask if you've considered the premium tier of breathing. You're wondering why this video sounds a lot like the AI generated advertisements you see, it's because I had to clone my voice with AI because my autoimmune condition spread up to my throat and then to my jaw, limiting my ability to speak. And until I get that fixed, I'm going to write scripts and have an AI voice clone of myself do the reading so that I can continue to make content.