Roku Reports $183 Million Profit for Third Quarter as Fox Deal Looms
Roku made $183 million in net income in the third quarter of 2026, more than seven times what it made in the same quarter a year earlier. The company released its results on Monday, November 2, after US markets closed.
Roku makes the software that runs the home screen on many smart TVs, along with the sticks and boxes that plug into a set. Variety reported that total revenue reached $1.50 billion, up 24% on the year. Total gross profit, the money left after the direct costs of making and delivering its products and services, came to $649 million, also up 24%. Roku also beat Wall Street's earnings expectations.
Most of the growth came from the company's platform business, which sells advertising and earns money from subscriptions that people buy through its channel store. That segment brought in $1.3 billion, up 23%. Advertising sales rose 23%, and subscription sales rose 23% too. Political advertising in the quarter was higher than in the comparable quarter of the 2024 US presidential election cycle, and the media and entertainment category posted its fastest revenue growth in four years.
Viewing also grew. Roku counted 39.9 billion streaming hours in the quarter, up 9% from a year earlier. A streaming hour is one hour of content watched on the platform.
Devices told a different story. Sales of hardware reached $194 million, up 33%. But the devices side lost $48.6 million at the operating level, and its gross margin was negative 25%. The company blamed mostly higher memory costs, the price of the chips that store data inside its products.
Roku did not host an earnings call this quarter, and it gave no financial guidance for the period. It pointed to its pending acquisition by Fox Corp. Fox announced on June 15 that it would buy Roku for $22 billion, and the deal is expected to close in the first half of 2027. Roku's founder and chief executive, Anthony Wood, will keep an ongoing role at the combined company and will join the Fox board once the deal closes.
Roku had been more forward-looking earlier this year. In April it raised its full-year platform revenue forecast to $5 billion, which it said would be 21% growth, according to Reuters.
For viewers, the immediate picture is simple. Roku's quarter shows its advertising and subscription businesses growing at a steady clip, while its hardware side is under pressure from component costs. What comes next depends on the Fox deal, which is still waiting to close.
