FOX Digital Platforms is the name Fox Corporation is giving its combined digital businesses on the day it closed its $22 billion acquisition of Roku, promoting Mustafa Ozgen to chief executive of Roku and expanding Pete Distad’s direct-to-consumer brief to include Tubi and Frndly TV, while Roku media president Charlie Collier and Tubi chief executive Anjali Sud leave the group, The Hollywood Reporter reported on 6 November from a staff memo by Anthony Wood and Paul Cheesebrough.
Key facts
- Structure: Tubi Media Group becomes FOX Digital Platforms; five stated goals cover CTV share, free AVOD, premium subscriptions, performance advertising and global growth
- Roku: Mustafa Ozgen named CEO; open-platform pledge restated
- Tubi / Frndly: move under Pete Distad (CEO, Fox direct-to-consumer); Mike Bidgoli promoted to president of Tubi; Lisa Holme (Roku Channel content) reports to Distad
- Exits: Charlie Collier (president, Roku Media); Anjali Sud (CEO, Tubi – “new role outside the company”); also Chris Handman (Roku GC) and Robyn Peterson (EVP, AdRise)
Day-one reporting lines
Wood and Cheesebrough’s memo, published in full by THR, frames the first 100 days around three cores rather than a finished org chart. Ozgen keeps Device, Product and Technology and adds AdRise product and engineering, the Roku Channel, streaming partnerships, subscriptions, Howdy, Roku Pay and brand. Distad, who built Fox One, adds Tubi’s free service and Frndly TV’s live-TV bundle – a deliberate free-plus-pay stack under one DTC chief. Bidgoli, an early Tubi investor who ran product and engineering, becomes Tubi president reporting to Distad; Frndly founder Andy Karofsky joins the same group.
Advertising sales across the portfolio stay with Jeff Collins. Gil Fuchsberg becomes chief strategy officer reporting to Wood and Cheesebrough. Support functions named in the memo include Andy Croxson (finance), Pooja Dalal (HR), Angie Park (general counsel, FOX Digital Platforms) and Seana Sullivan (communications). Melody Hildebrandt remains CTO; Jeff Dow is to retire at the fiscal year-end, with the Tempe broadcast facility moving into her organisation.
What the exits mean for film and TV distribution
Collier’s departure removes the executive most associated with Roku’s advertising and content partnerships just as Fox inherits the open CTV platform that studios and streamers use as a carriage and ad surface. Sud’s exit, described in the memo as a move to a role outside Fox with transitional help, ends a Tubi leadership run that turned the AVOD service into Fox’s main free movie-and-TV destination. Neither THR nor the memo names her next employer or discloses severance. Handman and Peterson also leave.
For rights-holders and sales agents, the practical question is continuity on Tubi content buying and Roku Channel packaging while Distad and Bidgoli settle reporting lines. The memo promises town halls in San Jose, San Francisco, Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Austin and New York across the following week and says Roku’s open platform – central to how independent and major distributors reach CTV households – “will remain open.” That pledge is political as well as technical: Fox’s sports and news inventory now sits beside a platform that still needs third-party apps and channels to keep device engagement high.
Our reading
The close and the chart arrived on the same Friday, which is the point: Fox is not waiting to translate a $22 billion CTV bet into names. Ozgen and Distad are the operators buyers should watch for Tubi slate decisions and Roku Channel carriage; Collier and Sud’s exits are the cost of that speed. The next evidence that would settle the film-desk angle is a first post-close Tubi or Roku Channel content commitment signed under Bidgoli and Holme – or a retreat from the open-platform line once Fox advertising priorities assert themselves.
Related: Fox closes $22bn Roku deal; US motion-picture jobs rise but stay below a year ago; Letterboxd talks with the New York Times Company.