- Walmart has completed its acquisition of Vizio
- Vizio makes more money from ads than from selling TVs
- Walmart plans to watch what you watch
Earlier this year we reported that Walmart was buying Vizio’s TV business, and that purchase has now cleared all the regulatory hurdles. That means Walmart is about to go big in the affordable TV space, where it currently competes via its own Onn brand. Vizio is a much bigger player than Onn, though, which is possibly proven by you reading that sentence and thinking “What the heck is Onn?”
This isn’t just about TVs, though. It’s about ads. Vizio’s financial results in 2021 made it clear that the firm was making twice as much money from ads, subscriptions and data than it was bringing in from actual TV sales. And that’s the business Walmart is really interested in.
Walmart watches the watchers
Walmart will be tracking what you watch on your Vizio TV. According to FlatpanelsHD, Walmart will be collecting viewing data via a system called ACR, short for Automated Content Recognition. That scans the content you watch to help target ads more effectively.
That means the prize here isn’t so much the TV business as the SmartCast operating system: as Walmart says, the acquisition “will also bring to market new and differentiated ways for advertisers to meaningfully connect with customers at scale and boost product discovery, helping brands achieve greater impact from their advertising investments with Walmart Connect”. And if there’s one thing we can all agree on, it’s wanting our TVs to help brands achieve greater impact from their advertising investments.
As we reported a few weeks back, many TV firms are embracing advertising as a way of subsidising the price of their TVs – and that’s both good news and bad news for buyers. Good news, because of course it keeps prices low. But as we’ve seen many times before, the more ad-dependent a sector becomes the more ads you’ll see – often to the point where the service you’re trying to use becomes deeply unpleasant unless you pony up for an ad-free experience. Even the more expensive options among the best TVs aren’t free of this intrusion – and the cheaper TVs are largely designed around it. It’s one reason why the rumored return of Apple’s plans to make its own TV set might actually work, given the company’s privacy focus.