The company recently made a deal with Whip Media to manage its ad revenue reporting for WatchFree+. As a pretty hefty US TV brand already, the company has managed to start making a transition to being Roku-like before Roku started being Roku-like by putting out its own TVs. That has apparently translated into 17 million user accounts for Vizio’s TV apps.
Vizio is going to use Whip Media’s platform to analyze the data for ads served to its FAST channels and AVOD on WatchFree+. It gets a little brand-y when you start dissecting Vizio’s platform, but it’s basically SmartCast, the actual foundation for WatchFree+, which is a service/app running on SmartCast. There’s also a thing called VIZIOgram that’s a photo- and video-sharing app.
There’s a good news/bad news aspect to all this: on the plus side, smart TVs need to do smarter things, and that means apps and services and hooks to differentiate one product from the next; on the bad side, they all seem to converge on very similar apps and services. Maybe that is why we should call them connected TVs and not smart because, they’re kind of average intelligence, and deviating towards the mean.
However, it would be really good to get early data on how ads perform because, if the numbers hold up, if we are kind of reverting to a streaming, cord-cutting version of traditional ad-supported broadcast TV then it gets interesting because it becomes a razor to sell razor blade opportunity.
Now, you get that TV into a home, by hook or by crook (a euphemism for aggressive sales and pricing plans), and you look at the recurring revenues that could come from the installation. If, as seems to be the trend, the TV becomes the focal point of the home hub, you’re looking at a multitude of opportunities to generate revenues. If I am TV, I want to be getting paid for anyone who is using me to make money. Ads, services, e-commerce, you name it.
Vizio doesn’t need to make ad tech deals. It needs to get to DoorDash and figure out how to get a cut of every pizza ordered through its TVs with some sort of one-click setup on the remote. There’s gold in pizzas and TVs finally coming together in perfect harmony. CPAs, MRR, conversion rates… that’s what’s going to drive the future of TV set profits. Just simplify the branding. Way too many portmanteau words with a capitalized letter in the middle, somewhere, and you don’t have to name every damn feature. Just focus on one thing, and talk it up. You know, Roku-like.
