The media giant confirmed the massive buyout was the only guaranteed way to permanently mold a bright red Fox shortcut into the plastic of 70 million household remotes.
Fox Corporation announced Tuesday it had successfully purchased streaming pioneer Roku for $22 billion, a historic media consolidation aimed entirely at securing one of the four brightly colored, un-remappable shortcut buttons at the bottom of the device's remote control.
The merger will combine Fox's broadcast networks and its ad-supported streaming service, Tubi, with Roku's massive hardware footprint, creating the third-largest player in the United States television industry. However, Fox executives confirmed the astronomical price tag was simply the necessary cost of doing business to ensure viewers can accidentally launch Fox News by resting their palm on the bottom half of the clicker.
For years, we have watched helplessly as consumers effortlessly launched Netflix, Disney+, and even Sling TV with a single, mindless thumb press.
"By acquiring Roku outright, we bypass the middleman and guarantee that a permanent, raised rubber Fox button will be injected into the manufacturing molds of 70 million devices," Vance said. "We have carefully mapped the exact quadrant where users typically grip the remote while frantically searching for the mute button, and we are placing the Tubi launcher directly in the line of fire."
The company also addressed regulatory concerns regarding a potential walled media ecosystem. In a press release, Fox promised that Roku will remain a perfectly "open-platform" where users are completely free to watch competing content providers, provided they are willing to navigate a labyrinthine new home screen where every directional arrow eventually routes back to a live stream of "The Masked Singer."
At press time, Fox engineers were reportedly hard at work developing a mandatory firmware update that would cause the Roku remote to emit a high-pitched shrieking noise anytime a user highlights the CNN app.