Walmart just bought TV maker Vizio for $2.3 billion now I wouldn't be at all surprised if
you just scrolled right on past that headline the other day if you even saw it and you might
be surprised to learn that I'm not here to try to convince you that you should care but I do think
that you're going to want to know what's about to happen to your smart TV no matter what brand it
is welcome back everyone I'm Caleb Denison and this has been an interesting week for me as you'll
soon see played out on this YouTube channel over the next few days I was just finishing a review
of Vizio's new Quantum Pro TV when I heard that Walmart might buy Vizio for a whole lot of money
so I kind of folded that possibility in toward the end of the review but I had no idea at that time
that rumor was going to come true just 2 days later so if or when you watch that review keep
what we're about to talk about here in mind okay so Walmart bought Vizio big deal right well yeah
actually it is literally a big deal one worth over $2.3 billion that alone tells us something
and while I understand some folks who are like really into TVs myself included may be curious
about what that means for Vizio TVs in the future I don't think that's nearly as interesting as what
Walmart will do through Vizio TVs and perhaps more importantly what the ripple effect will
likely be across every Smart TV platform that's right it doesn't matter whether you own a Vizio
TV Roku TV Google TV Fire TV Samsung TV or LG TV what Walmart is about to do could have a profound
effect on your TV watching experience at home and I'm about to make that very real for you oh and if
you own an Apple TV well you may be safe-ish for now but we'll get back to that so we're going to
kick this off by doing what one should always do when a market shifting event happens let's follow
the money I actually think this is going to be fun let's go yeah we followed that money right
back to the uh Studio it was getting a little loud in that parking lot anyway to start let's
acknowledge that Vizio like a lot of big companies has a stored history Vizio grew really quickly in
2006 it brought in about $700 million and in just one year more than doubled that to an estimated
$2 billion in Vue in 2014 and 2015 Vizio made a couple of big Acquisitions which helped make
its Smartcast Smart TV platform what it is today and that's going to be really important in just a
minute also in 2015 a Chinese brand called La EO almost bought Vizio for $2 billion again this was
9 years ago China's government ended up blocking that so it didn't happen but Vizio continued to
sell TVs lots of TVs going into people's homes millions of little Trojan horses in fact right
up through 2020 Vizio was the number two selling TV brand in the United States but since then
Vizio has fallen to the number four or five slot depending on which report you reference why does
this matter well it tells us that Vizio's status as a TV brand fell quite a bit in the last three
years now one could understandably think that to mean that Vizio needed some financial help and
maybe it did but I don't think Walmart showed up to help VIs I I think what's happening here
is that Vizio is going to help out Walmart see while Vizio sales may have slipped over the past
few years it's still put a massive number of TVs into homes across the us over the past decade and
because folks still don't replace their TVs all that often it's estimated that Vizio has some 18
million active users of its Smart TV platform and Vizio has mountains of data on those people maybe
you're one of them so when Walmart bought Vizio it bought over 18 million advertising screens in
US homes that it could control and in doing so Walmart became one of the top 20 ad sellers in
the world outside of China that's huge no wonder this deal went through for $2.3 billion now this
notion that Walmart bought Vizio not because it wanted to make TVs but because it wanted to buy
advertising screens already in some 18 million homes and it's almost certain that number is
going to grow exponentially now because Walmart moves a lot of products that's not an original
take it's actually not even that hard to come to this conclusion but let me make this a whole lot
more real for you right now let's just take a break from Vizio and Walmart and just turn on
this TV and see what happens when I go to watch a show on Amazon Prime video now when I tried
this earlier I got an ad for Turbo Tax which is appropriate because it's tax time and I also got
an ad for a blink camera guess who owns blink cameras Amazon Amazon is showing me an ad for a
product that it not only sells but also makes talk about self-servicing I also got an ad for shopping
on Amazon but not just shopping on Amazon shopping for a Hyundai car on Amazon that's a two for one
ad right there think about this after 18 years of Amazon serving up video content with no ads at
all the retail giant which is not having trouble selling products decided to turn on ads to help
convince me to buy more products on Amazon as well as any other products its advertisers might want
me to buy or I can pony up three bucks a month to skip the ads and get HDR and Dolby Atmos back but
that's a rant for another day anyway Amazon Prime Video is now selling me retail products and it's
already happening on fire t TV devices as well you don't even have to be watching a show to see
an ad anymore now let's get out of the Amazon app and just back to the Google TV platform I may have
to deal with ads in these streaming services but at least my precious Google TV platform is mostly
ad free right and the ads we do see here are usually for content I might want to watch they
aren't trying to sell me retail products right wrong just the other day when I turned on this
Sony QD OLED TV running Google TV the first thing I saw was an ad for a Kia EV6 it was made to look
like a movie or a TV show that I could watch I almost clicked on it by accident but I didn't
even need to click on it because Google TV ran a full motion preview of it so I kind of just saw
the ad anyway retail advertising on smart TV guys it's about to explode Amazon knows what I like to
shop for and buy Google knows what I like to shop for both of them are now serving me ads
that are targeted to my my preferences and what do we know about advertising it works it always
works how do you suppose Walmart would like to grow even bigger than the behemoth it already
is Walmart product ads on Vizio TVs it's coming and it probably won't even take that long for it
to begin pretty soon Vizio TV owners are going to turn on their TV to watch the latest episode of
True Detective and before they can even navigate to the max app they're confronted by an ad for
a baby monitor because someone in the house bought diapers the day before I'll get back to
that advertising nightmare shortly let's set that aside for a moment and switch gears to talk about
Vizio's TVs themselves what's going on there will the TVs go down in quality up in quality stay the
same in short I don't know but more importantly I don't think Walmart or Vizio knows yet either
there may be some tentative plans right now I mean in these buyouts it's not uncommon for the buyer
to tell the employees of the company that just got bought that they are committed to preserving
what has made Vizio such a powerful brand blah blah blah blah lip service blah but in the end I
think what happens to the Vizio hardware is really to be determined and one reason I don't feel super
optimistic about things there was Zero mention of Vizio's TV in the press release that Walmart sent
out about this massive buy in fact it was somewhat hilariously all centered around Smartcast which
if you didn't know is a name that Vizio got rid of several months ago as it released its
all new Smart TV platform that Vizio calls home screen now I mean dig that for a second will you
Walmart has probably been planning this buyout for so long that it was operating on months or
years old information because it clearly didn't know that Vizio ditched Smartcast, Smartcast is
gone now the thing that Walmart bought Vizio for the smart TV platform had has evolved and Walmart
apparently didn't even know about that yikes not a good look anyway I don't anticipate Vizio putting
out another PS series Quantum X TV again I think Vizio is a better name for a TV than on with two
ends and that's about as much as Walmart cares about the TV performance okay back to selling
you stuff or selling me stuff so we've already covered that it's not just the streaming services
running retail ads it's on platforms now as well Amazon does it Google does it Walmart can do it
now what about Roku Samsung and LG well they've been running ads too but they haven't been quite
so focused on retail product ads at least not in my experience but that is going to have to change
advertisers are going to go where the eyeballs are and whoever has the eyeballs is going to want
to get that ad money look all this was already happening it's just that Walmart is a market mover
when Walmart does something everyone else reacts so now not only will we be dealing with ads on
streaming services unless we pay a premium to get rid of them we will be getting ads on our TV even
before we start watching something welcome to the new era of streaming TV it's now officially worse
than cable but that's only until cable boxes start doing the same thing because as we know
cable operators are already struggling and they love to make that money too oh man and I almost
forgot let's not forget that there is now a TV that you can get for free you just have to deal
with this whole second screen that plays nonstop ads oh you hadn't heard of that yeah it's a thing
now you might be wondering is there anywhere that's going to be safe is there any Bastion for
an ad free experience well for now at least Apple isn't selling ads to third parties for display on
its Apple TV 4K boxes but I mean apple is Apple but might even the great Apple climb down off its
high horse at at some point look there's a whole lot more that's going wrong with streaming TV but
I'm saving that for the very next video that I'm going to shoot here in about 5 minutes so I'll
see you again soon because we are just getting started thanks as always for watching everyone
what do you think about all this let's talk about it down in the comment section slap this video
with a like if you appreciated it subscribe so you don't miss the next one I'm about to shoot
I'll see you on that next one and until then here's two other videos I think you might like