One Simple Reason Why Fox Needs Roku
Plus: ‘Toy Story 5,’ ‘The Death of Robin Hood,’ and ‘The Furious.’
THERE IS A GREAT NUMBER of ancillary reasons why the Fox Corporation dropped $22 billion to purchase Roku, the maker of set-top boxes and television operating systems through which an enormous amount of streaming traffic flows. But all of them come back to two charts in the last two annual reports to Fox investors.
Here’s the estimated number of subscribers to various Fox cable networks from 2023 to 2024:
And here’s the estimated number of subscribers to those networks from 2024 to 2025:
As you can see, the only word to describe the declines here is “precipitous.” Fox News Channel—which is, alongside ESPN and CNN, among the most ubiquitous cable channels—has declined from 72 million subscribers in 2023 to 61 million subscribers by 2025. Fox Business, from 70 million to 60 million. The sports networks have seen similar, albeit less dramatic, declines.
Now, none of this is new knowledge and nothing here is unique to Fox. People are not unsubscribing from Fox News in protest; indeed, Fox’s ratings compare pretty well even to broadcast TV. Cable packages are, simply, in terminal decline as more and more consumers of television opt for rotating streaming subscriptions and free services like YouTube and Tubi. (More on that last one in a moment.) But it will eventually be an enormous problem for Fox, given how much revenue the company generates from “affiliate fees,” the per-subscriber (around $2) charge Fox earns monthly.1 (Indeed, Fox generates more revenue from affiliate fees than advertising, by far.)
Of all the legacy networks, Fox is in the worst shape in the streaming world. Despite launching Hulu alongside NBC, Fox divested its interest in the company as part of the sale of the 20th Century Fox movie studio and those assets to Disney.2 And since then they’ve been kind of adrift.
Fox One, the standalone streaming service combining Fox News and Fox Sports, doesn’t seem to be lighting the world on fire; the last numbers I’ve seen suggest that the $20/month service has just a couple million subscribers. And while Lachlan Murdoch insists that churn is low and audiences stuck around after football season for Fox News content, we don’t have much in the way of hard data to back that up. Regardless, no one disputes it lags far behind competitors like Paramount+ (CBS) or Peacock (NBC).
Fox does have one bright spot, however: Tubi, a free ad-supported TV (FAST) channel specializing in terrible movies that no one else seems to have. According to Nielsen’s measure of television-based audience behavior, the Gauge, Tubi captures about 3 percent of audience viewing time; when combined with Fox’s broadcast and cable networks, that meant that Fox, as of May, accounted for roughly 7.2 percent of total TV usage. Folding Roku TV—which controls about 3 percent of total viewing time, according to the Gauge—into the Fox family instantly moves it near the top of the charts, ahead of Netflix, NBC, and Paramount. This will instantly scale their advertising efforts. And the passive revenue generated by the cut taken from users who subscribe to other services through Roku will replace a decent chunk of those diminishing affiliate fees; Roku generated more than $4 billion in “platform revenue” last year, which includes both their advertising rates and the fees they charged other streamers for distribution on the Roku platform.
But they’ll also control what is considered by many to be among the most valuable pieces of real estate in the world of streaming: Roku’s homepage. They’ll be able to drive Roku’s 100 million users to subscribe to Fox One.3 And they’ll need some percentage of those users to sign up to counter the ongoing collapse of the cable bundle.
SPEAKING OF TV, I had a big sitdown with the one and only Richard Rushfield of the Ankler to discuss the state of TV and interrogate him about his creation of a Mount Rushmore of television. It was a fun episode, hope you give it a listen:
The Mount Rushmore of TV
On this week’s episode, I’m rejoined by my first guest, the great Richard Rushfield, to talk all things TV. What’s the deal with Fox buying Roku? What does the post-peak-TV era look like? And, perhaps most importantly, who is on the Mount Rushmore of television
KIND OF INTENSE episode of Across the Movie Aisle this week. Lines crossed, friendships ended, classics defended and denigrated. (I kid. It was a lot of fun! If you’re a debate-team kid, you might enjoy it!)
Three Separate Reviews!
OKAY, THE BIG RELEASE this week is Toy Story 5. Gonna make oodles of money. The short version of my review: “It’s closer to the fourth than the first three, but all five movies are winners.” Longer version: The slow march of death approaches for us all. A taste of my review:
I was 12 or so when the original film came out, not too far removed from the age of toys myself; I now have a daughter just a few years older than Bonnie (Scarlett Spears), who spends much of this film wrestling with the weird in-between age of toys and friends and screens and social media.
That the franchise is, generally speaking, a metaphor for parenthood and all its troubles is neither a new nor profound insight: Cowboy Woody (Tom Hanks) and Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) have spent the franchise fretting about the fates of their kids, Andy and Bonnie. Yes, yes: They also worry about their own obsolescence—this is, naturally, the key theme of Toy Story 5, what with the arrival of the tablet known as Lilypad (Greta Lee)—as well as the general fear of being forgotten by those they raised.
But the worries of the toys are wrapped up in their self-imposed burden to prepare their kids for life outside the home.
The Death of Robin Hood, meanwhile, is pretty aggressive counterprogramming: It is much darker, much slower, and much more contemplative. From my review:
The Death of Robin Hood is a hard film to recommend. After the intense bloodiness of that opening sequence it slows to a crawl: This is a movie about the search for redemption, but it doesn’t end in cathartic, purifying bloodshed a là Unforgiven. Sarnoski is too contemplative for that, perhaps to a fault. But his seriousness and commitment to the ideals under consideration give the film real moral heft.
You may not mind the shift to a more languid pace, since the film simply looks great: Cinematographer Pat Scola (who worked with Sarnoski on his previous two features) makes excellent use of his 35mm film and natural light. There are these wonderfully backlit shots throughout that make the film sometimes feel as if it’s a shadow play, silhouettes doing combat against a burning hut or figures talking into the sun. The light itself almost feels like a character: in those first brutal forty minutes, there is a constant murk, an inescapable griminess. Wind and fog and snow and smoke obscure the sights. But once Robin lands on Brigid’s island, the murk lifts and the sun shines so bright it hurts your eyes. There’s a cleansing glow to the place, a beacon of light that shoots directly into Robin’s soul, exposing the darkness within.
And finally, there’s The Furious. I didn’t write a full review, but I did log it on Letterboxd; apologies for the profanity, but I would like to hammer home how wild the last 30 minutes of that movie are here:
I’ll be honest: I was ever-so-slightly underwhelmed by the first 80 minutes or so (“yeah, this is cool, but that’s it?”) and then the last 30 minutes is one continuous series of “holy shit! Holy shit!!” moments. Like, first it’s just cool because Yayan Ruhian shows up (holy shit, look at that bow and arrow) and then they start the two-on-two fight sequence (holy shit, they’re fighting back and forth and it’s genuinely two on two, not two one on one choreographies cut together) and then that guy who looks like a bowling ball reappears (holy shit!) and starts fighting like Blanca from Street Fighter (holy shit!!) and it turns into a LEGIT FIVE MAN BATTLE ROYALE (holy shit!!!).
All three get thumbs-ups of varying enthusiasms from me. Consider one of them your assigned viewing and get your butts to a theater!
It is worth noting that despite the decline in absolute numbers of subscribers, affiliate fee revenue is up for Fox. That’s because Fox has been incredibly aggressive about negotiating affiliate fee and broadcast retransmission fee increases from cable providers and cable-like services like YouTube TV. They can do this for now because their audiences tend to be older and the average cable subscriber tends to be older. But virtually no one believes that sort of practice can go on forever. The subscribers will eventually die, and they’re not likely to be replaced by younger customers.
Disney would eventually complete its acquisition of Hulu in 2023 and is in the process of folding that service into Disney+, which often causes me to wonder how long it will be until my 10-year-old daughter stumbles onto Rick and Morty or Family Guy or Kathryn Bigelow’s ultraviolent and highly sexualized 1995 thriller, Strange Days.
If you don’t want to get nudged that way, you might consider picking up an Apple TV. Yes, Apple’s hardware is a little pricier than Roku’s, but I’ll be honest with you: Changing from a Roku Stick to an Apple TV five years ago immediately improved my quality of life by about 12 percent. It just works better and it’s a cleaner user experience because the home page isn’t loaded up with janky ads fed to me by some intrusive algorithm. Plus, if you buy an Apple TV you’ll probably get three free months of the streaming service Apple TV (yes, it’s confusing), meaning you can watch the first season of Widow’s Bay, which I reviewed last week. It’s a good show, you’ll love it!
Love the Roku device and UI, but not enough to stomach this merger.
Thank you. I was considering buying Roku but will likely not do so now. I really appreciate you