If you missed the huge news earlier today, Fox is buying Roku. While massive news in general, Fox’s acquisition of Roku is also likely to be incredible significant for the FAST market. After all, it will result in two of the biggest free streaming services, Tubi and The Roku Channel, coming under the same ownership.
Although the big names in the paid streaming space – the Netflix, Disney+s, and Prime Videos – are considered the main courses by many, the FAST space has been growing rapidly over recent years, resulting in the emergence of many new, and totally free, players.
Tubi and The Roku Channel are two of the biggest in this space. Just based on the most recent data from Nielsen (March 2026), the two services collectively accounted for 5.2% of total TV time.
That percentage is fairly evenly split between them as well, with The Roku Channel accounting for 3% and Tubi the other 2.2%.
This also means that following the acquisition of Roku by Tubi, the combined company will own 5% of total TV share. And, for reference, that’s 5% of total TV share across paid and free services, not just free services.
If only looking at the individual FAST market, as already explained, these are two of the very biggest players around.
Will Tubi and The Roku Channel Merge Into One Service?
Right now, that’s one of the very big unknown outcomes of this Fox-Roku merger, and it remains unclear how soon we will know any more than we do right now.
In the immediate future, nothing is expected to change. This acquisition still has to go through the usual regulatory hurdles and both free services will continue to operate as they are while that process plays out.
Even after the acquisition is completed, there is still the possibility that Fox will decide to continue operating both as standalone services. Both have been growing quickly over the past few years, and clearly have their own dedicated user bases.
Of course, in the long-term, it is entirely possible that the two services will eventually become one. Whether that means Tubi is folded into The Roku Channel, or vice versa, is anyone’s guess.
What may play a role in that eventual decision is if the gap between the two starts to grow, and to a point where it becomes harder to ignore.
Again, using Nielsen’s monthly data, Tubi hasn’t seen as much steady growth over the past year as The Roku Channel.
Rewind to March of last year and Tubi held a total TV share of 1.9%, and this compared to a total TV share of 2.2% for The Roku Channel. While both free services have grown over the past year, The Roku Channel’s share has grown significantly more.
If the next twelve months were to pan out like the last, then the gap between Tubi and The Roku Channel could be much larger, raising the possibility that it might make more sense for Tubi to be folded into The Roku Channel.
If things do play out like that, one thing is for sure, there will be a lot of unhappy Tubi users.
Over the years, Tubi has cultivated a very unique and loyal user base, and one that hasn’t needed to rely on a hardware platform like Roku OS to fuel its growth.
It seems unlikely those users will feel the same about Tubi if the popular free service suddenly became nothing more than a section within The Roku Channel.
Again, nothing is clear right now so we’ll just have to wait and see how this all unfolds. But, no matter what happens, this is going to be a major acquisition, and one that will impact the streaming market in multiple ways, including the free streaming sector.
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