Walmart Closes $2.3B Vizio Deal, Buying In to Cutthroat Streaming Game

It’s no coincidence that less than a month after Amazon Prime Video made its advertising tier the default for its subscribers in January, its major retail rival unveiled a deal to buy television maker Vizio to help power its own foray into raking in connected TV ad dollars. Now, following a monthslong regulatory waiting period, that $2.3 billion-dollar buy closed on Tuesday.

As for the deal rationale, it sets up the Doug McMillon-run Walmart to be a bigger player in the advertising world that is being increasingly reshaped by Amazon. “The margins generally are pretty low on TVs today, the hardware,” Walmart CFO John David Rainey told a Bank of America investor event in June. “A lot of the money that’s being made there is in the software part of that, and we want to take advantage of that.”