Fox Bought the Living Room

While Paramount and Netflix were busy trying to buy each other's content libraries, Fox just bought something different: the box sitting under your TV. Fox Corporation announced it's acquiring Roku for $22 billion Monday morning — $160 per share, $96 in cash and 0.9693 shares of Fox Class A stock for each Roku share. Existing Fox shareholders end up owning roughly 73% of the combined company, Roku holders the remaining 27%. Here's what makes this one different from everything else in this series. Fox isn't buying a content library. Fox sold off its entertainment studio to Disney back in 2019 and deliberately kept the news and sports — the stuff people watch live, the stuff that doesn't get displaced by a streaming algorithm. Fox isn't even new to Roku, as it turns out — it held a stake in the company since 2013, then sold 5% of it in 2020 to help fund the $440 million Tubi acquisition. Now, six years later, they're buying back in for the whole thing. Now they own the pipes themselves.…