Walmart is working to fully incorporate Vizio into its ecosystem. By the end of 2025, Vizio TVs will only be available at Walmart and Sam’s Club. This decision comes after Walmart bought Vizio for $2.3 billion in December 2024. This move showed that the company wanted to grow beyond retail and into the profitable connected TV (CTV) advertising market.
Vizio will become one of Walmart’s more than 90 private-label brands under the new plan. However, the company has not said whether Vizio TVs will be sold under the Onn brand. Walmart will use Vizio’s SmartCast operating system to run smart TVs that are only available at Walmart. This integration will slowly take the place of Roku OS on new Onn models, making the hardware and software work together in a way that Walmart controls completely.
Walmart can now directly compete with Amazon’s Fire TV and Roku’s platform business thanks to this integration. Walmart now has more power in the retail media space because it controls both the TV hardware and the operating system. This lets them show ads that can be bought, interactive content, and collect first-party viewer data.
Walmart can now combine its Walmart Connect media platform with Vizio’s SmartCast, which already has a strong advertising framework. This move is expected to speed up Walmart’s connected TV advertising revenue, giving advertisers another option in the quickly growing CTV market besides Roku, Amazon, and Google.
Walmart now has full control over pricing and distribution because it has taken Vizio out of Best Buy, Target, Amazon, and other major electronics stores. Trade experts say that this could help Walmart’s value-focused position in the TV market by giving them more competitive prices and driving foot traffic and online engagement through exclusive deals. For shoppers, this could mean cheaper smart TVs that are more integrated into stores, but it also makes people wonder if there will be more ads and how to balance cheap hardware with user experiences that are full of ads.
Walmart’s dual control of TV hardware and OS is similar to Amazon’s Fire TV playbook, making it another big competitor for home-screen ad space. Roku has worked with Walmart on Onn TVs for a long time, but now it has lost one of its biggest retail OS partners. Vizio used to be known for its low-cost TVs sold at many stores, but now it is changing from a multi-channel consumer electronics brand to a private-label engine for Walmart’s retail media strategy. For CTV advertisers, Walmart’s ownership of SmartCast gives them a new way to reach customers who want to buy things directly through their TV screens.
This move shows that stores are combining hardware, content, and ads more and more. Walmart is now using Vizio’s technology to make interactive, shoppable TV shows, just like Amazon uses Fire TV to connect shopping and streaming. This will eventually make money for the living room. For the display industry, this decision is another big change in the distribution and OS ecosystems. It will make the smart TV market even more fragmented and bring retail and connected media even closer together.
