The Murdoch family's media empire is making a big move. Fox will buy the streaming company Roku in a stock-and-cash deal worth around 22 billion dollars (20 billion euros) - one of the biggest media purchases of recent years. Roku is the software that powers many of the smart TVs and streaming devices people already have in their living rooms, with a reach of up to 100 million households.

Fox says the merged company will become the third-largest television business in the US by viewership. The calculation is clear: Fox's news and sports channels plus their free streaming service Tubi, combined with the Roku platform, mean direct access to a huge audience and - more importantly for them - to advertising data. CEO Lachlan Murdoch called the deal a „defining" moment for the company.

The translation is simpler than the press release. Traditional television is slowly dying, and those who have held power for decades are now buying the infrastructure through which we watch everything else. They aren't buying content - they're buying control over what appears on the screen before we press the button. When a single media giant owns both the channels and the player software, the choice we're offered is already cut to measure.

For the region this isn't as distant a story as it looks. The same consolidation logic has already reached us - big players buy up TV stations and platforms, and the viewer thinks they're choosing freely while the owner writes their menu. Roku invented the streaming TV; now Murdoch decides what the next chapter is. The question is for whose eyes, and with whose ads.