Murdoch’s Streaming Masterstroke

**Julia Alexander** (0:00)
Roku becomes, to your point, Peter, the home page to access content, and now Fox can own the advertising space in the CTV streaming war, plus take a percentage of all those new signups.

**Peter Hamby** (0:14)
Welcome to The Powers That Be Daily, Pucks podcast focused on the intersection of Wall Street, Washington, Silicon Valley and Hollywood, and the players who run it all. I'm Peter Hamby. It's Wednesday, June 17th. Today, I'm joined by Julia Alexander. To break down Fox's big swing purchase of Roku. Lachlan Murdoch is finally muscling the Fox media empire into the big time streaming wars. And Julia is here to explain Roku's reach and what plans might be in the cooker. We also talk about big TV ratings for the New York Knicks and the first week of the World Cup and offer some notes of caution about how Nielsen is calculating audience numbers for these big games.
We'll discuss all that and much more on today's episode of The Powers That Be.
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Happy Wednesday everyone. And welcome to The Powers That Be. I'm joined today by my colleague, Julia Alexander. We're gonna talk about Fox making a huge deal to acquire Roku. We're gonna talk about big, big World Cup ratings. And of course, because it's Julia, we're gonna start with the New York Knicks. And I know a lot of people out there are sick of talking about the finals. New Yorkers certainly are not. There's one more day to talk Knicks because you got the Victory Parade tomorrow. Maybe we'll be talking about that on Friday too with some clips. But Julia, congratulations. I will say to people watching on YouTube, to people listening, there were about four to five purebred, hard-o Knicks fans in my life, not fair weather fans like the Haim sisters who I love. But you guys were, you're from LA, you're from the Valley.
You, Julia, were one, I should say them by names. My buddy AJMihultra out here in LA. My buddy Travis Hellwig out here in LA. My Snapchat homies, Kevin Onmall, John Brennan. Congratulations to all of you sincerely. I mean, this is a big deal. And look, people hate on New York cause the Yankees, you can't really hate on the Knicks cause they've been such dog shit for so long. No one likes James Dolan, but this team was obviously so likable. I'm not gonna warm this over with any more boring takes, but here's what I want to ask you, the only thing, Julia. We saw all the clips of the celebrations in the street. We did see Mikhail Bridges on Going Drunk on YouTube live earlier this week. That was pretty funny. Those guys were so hung over on the Today Show, but look, I'm out here. We're all feasting on these clips and social media, but New York is a city of a million stories every day. What was your little New York Knicks moment, the night they won the finals?

**Julia Alexander** (4:31)
Yeah, it was a beautiful New York day. It was Brooklyn Pride, and so we started out in Park Slope. We were at one of the oldest lesbian bars in Brooklyn, and we were there, and then we went to Green Point, which is north Brooklyn for people listening and watching, and we watched the Knicks there, and then we made our way over to Fort Greene and kind of took apart the Spike Lee-type block party thing that was happening, and the last thing I'll say is my memory gets hazy around that point, but it was a lovely night.