Forget Fox’s 4% Stock Jump: Its Roku Buy Is About to Dominate Free Streaming for Good

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By: Christian Pierce

For the last three years, Wall Street has written off legacy broadcast TV players as dead money. They faced shrinking cable subscriber bases, cutthroat streaming competition, and ballooning content costs that crushed margins. Most analysts pegged Fox as the most exposed of the bunch, tied heavily to linear ad revenue that was supposed to decline year over year indefinitely. The company’s sudden 4% stock jump on Friday didn’t just beat expectations. It exposed how badly the market misjudged Fox’s quiet positioning to dominate the fastest growing segment of streaming.

J.P. Morgan and Wells Fargo both upgraded Fox to Overweight this week, raising their price targets to $82 and $80 respectively. The upgrades sent Fox stock up roughly 4% to around $65.45 on Friday.
FOX Stock Card
The upgrades followed Fox’s blowout fourth quarter results. Television revenue rose 45% year over year to $2.48 billion, with segment EBITDA jumping 129% to $705 million. Its free streaming platform Tubi hit 110 million monthly active users at the end of fiscal 2026, with revenue up 35% and viewing time up 17% for the quarter. Analysts pointed to two near-term catalysts driving growth: the 2026 FIFA World Cup, which Wells Fargo now expects to generate $800 million in revenue, and an upcoming record political advertising cycle. Fox’s decision to skip early renegotiations of its NFL media rights deal also removed a major source of investor uncertainty. The pending Roku acquisition is the largest piece of the bull case, though. Combining Tubi with The Roku Channel would create the largest free ad-supported streaming TV operator in the market, with access to Roku’s more than 100 million streaming households. Wells Fargo estimates the pairing could generate roughly $300 million in incremental advertising revenue within two years, from better ad pricing, higher inventory fill rates, homescreen ad placements, and improved monetization of third-party content. J.P. Morgan noted Fox currently trades at 6.8 times enterprise value to its raised fiscal 2028 EBITDA estimate, below the recent industry average of roughly 8 times. Five analysts have revised their Fox earnings estimates upward for the upcoming period, according to InvestingPro data.

The market has not yet priced in just how much control the combined Fox-Roku entity will have over free ad-supported streaming inventory. Ad buyers currently split their budgets across dozens of small free streaming platforms, with no single player holding enough scale to demand premium pricing. That changes overnight once the deal closes. Fox will be able to package linear sports and political ad slots with streaming ad inventory across its entire combined user base, offering a reach no other free streaming player can match. Competitors like Pluto TV and Amazon Freevee will be forced to either cut ad prices to compete, or sink more money into content to draw users away. Most will not be able to do both at scale without burning through cash reserves far faster than their investors will tolerate. Any investor writing off Fox’s recent gains as a temporary fluke is missing the biggest legacy media turnaround play of the last five years.

Author bio: Christian Pierce, chief financial columnist and markets commentator covering media and entertainment sector mergers and valuation for 12 years.