Walmart buying cheap crappy TV brand is antitrust in a world that has many cheap crappy TV brands? At least the Microsoft and IE thing made some sense, it's not like we're hurting for choice here.
Clearly worked enough with Onn brand for them to keep consolidating.
Just at the surface level this hurts:
1. Other brands selling TVs in Walmart.
2. Advertisement space will be cheaper for Walmart when they advertise on their own TVs, toeing the line of anti-trust.
3. Companies that offer advertising and data aggregation across TV brands will now have fewer brands to sell on.
4. Fewer consumer TV brands in general.
5. Walmart can adopt a loss lead model, they don't need to actually make money on the TV, they can make it up in 2-3 other places. Similar to AWS and Amazon.
We've come a long way since fighting oil, metal, sugar and meat monopolies and cartels. Now we're worried about Walmart buying TV brands. Really puts the past century into perspective for me.
To play devil’s advocate: Disney has had a lot of problems lately and there’s a very plausible alternate reality where Pixar staying independent forced Disney to do better.
> The last 5 Pixar films are all flops, and all signs point to leadership at Disney interfering with the creative process.
4 were flops in the sense that their theatrical releases did not cover their budgets, but only 1 of those (Lightyear) was because audiences didn't want to see it (and so could be blamed on the creative process).
The other 3 did not cover their budgets with their theatrical releases because they didn't have domestic theater releases (other than very short runs in a handful of theaters probably to preserve eligibility for awards) and their foreign releases were in a much smaller number of countries than other Pixar movies.
Domestically, and in countries that had Disney+, they went straight to streaming.
In reverse order:
• Elemental made nearly $500 million in its theatrical run. In no universe can that be considered to be a flop.
• Turning Red did not have a domestic theatrical release, and a fairly limited foreign release. It was only in Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, Türkiye, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
In those countries in which both Turning Red and Toy Story 4 (the last Pixar movie before COVID started tanking box office) Turning Red earned about half of what Toy Story 4 did.
If we assume that ratio would have been similar in the countries Toy Story 4 was in that did not get Turning Red (Argentina, Australia, Austria, Belgium, Bolivia, Brazil, Canada, Chile, China, Colombia, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hong Kong, Iceland, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Malaysia, Mexico, Netherlands, Norway, Paraguay, Portugal, Russia, Singapore, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Taiwan, Thailand, United Kingdom, United States, Uruguay, and Venezuela) we get that Turning Red should have made around $420 million.
It was the second most watched streaming film of 2022.
• Similar for Luca. It's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, New Zealand, Poland, Romania, Russia, Serbia and Montenegro, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Türkiye, Ukraine, and United Arab Emirates.
In those countries that had both Luca and Toy Story 4, Luca earned $39 million and Toy Story 4 earned $70 million. That extrapolates to a full theatrical release for Luca would have been around $560 million.
It was the most watched streaming film of 2021.
• Soul's theatrical release was Bulgaria, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, Hong Kong, Hungary, Lithuania, Malaysia, New Zealand, Philippines, Poland, Romania, Russia/CIS, Saudi Arabia, Serbia and Montenegro, Singapore, Slovakia, Slovenia, South Africa, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and Vietnam.
I don't have the Toy Story 4 comparison for that one, but its total foreign box office was about 2.4x that of Luca, suggesting that had it gotten a full theatrical release it would have have done quite a bit north of $600 million.
Soul's release timing made it so its peak streaming straddled the year boundary so it didn't get near top spots on yearly streaming lists but was on top of weekly or monthly lists at the end of 2020 and start of 2021.
Turning Red was released in 50+ countries - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt8097030/releaseinfo/ I know it was released in at least one country not listed by you, because I have a photo of the movie poster from a theater (it stuck out to me as was using spanish language material, in a non spanish speaking country).
Note that list includes countries where it was only released on streaming. They are marked with "(internet)" and are more than half the list. Excluding all those (and one where it only was released for a specific film festival) there are 6 countries not on that list that weren't on mine.
My source was Box Office Mojo. It looks like they are only including countries where they have box office data.
Fortunately since that was where I got the Toy Story 4 data for comparison it doesn't seem like it affects the conclusions.
I can assure you, every founder I've worked with would go public before kneecapping growth or value.
It's not like when you sell your company you actually get all your equity as cash, you are certainly still working at your company for a year or more afterwards, with performance incentive stock options based on growth...
> company you actually get all your equity as cash
But many times you get a significant portion, enough that many founders can simply coast and it doesn't matter.
> you are certainly still working at your company for a year or more afterwards, with performance incentive stock
The meme of founders who sell their companies to Google and just sit there and do nothing has some truth to it.
Btw - when you go public you now have a very different set of "still working at your company" set of challenges and probably far worse with much more public scrutiny. You now answer to securities analysts, shareholders, lawyers, etc.
ATT is still pretty broken up. Its components turned into Verizon, QWest and ATT. The vertical integration (every US telecom device before the breakup was physically manufactured by an ATT subsidiary) is gone.
Meanwhile, I don't see how having more than 3 companies building cellular infrastructure helps at all. Regulated access for MVNOs seems to fill the competition niche.
Before the Apple acquisition Beats were ridiculed as being overly bassy and fashion focused. Post Apple acquisition they’ve at least gained a comparative reputation for sound quality. And they fill the sports segment of Apple’s lineup that Apple themselves don’t want to.
I have 2 Vizio tvs and neither is connected to the internet. I don’t use built in tv functionality because they all perform terrible and show unwanted content. I use 3rd party streaming boxes without issue. My oldest Vizio is nearly 10 years old and still works as well as I bought it and still on the same smart software from 10 years ago.
I owned a Vizio a few years ago, and that was my experience - I just needed a panel to turn on and show HDMI1, and bonus points if whatever was plugged in to HDMI1 could turn it on as well. That said, I don't think you and I are the majority, and a lot of people find it beneficial for these TVs to be online and stuff so they don't need a stick/box of some sort. Coming from the days of three remotes to watch a DVD with a stereo, and missing the days of Logitech Harmony, maybe it's not so bad to have one box and one remote handle everything for the average user. They clearly don't care about the ads or quality, so we shouldn't push that on them
A couple of years ago, Vizio posted that they earned more money from their analytics than TV sales. So of course that's how the TV behaves. It's also why they are so cheap.
They may be cheap and the UI does suck, but man, they are workhorses. I keep waiting for my 10+ year old 65" Vizio to die before I'll replace it with a 4K and it just won't quit.
I got a cheap Vizio TV for free that I was really impressed with the design of. That is, it did not have the outrageous number of HDMI plugs that a Sony has and didn't have stupid "Smart TV" features but instead it had some good quality and good sized speakers such that it was not a big improvement to add a soundbar to it. It really seemed to me that every cent on the BOM was carefully spent to deliver value.
One of the boards burned out though and one of my son's friends bought a Samsung TV that is also too low end to have "smart" features but I like it a lot less than the Vizio. (If I did not keep getting free TVs I might have upgraded my TV a long time ago...)
My last 2 TV's have been the higher end Vizio's and they have been great, sure they are showing their age next to OLED TV's right now but so are a lot of far more expensive ones from that same time.
But I never connect it to the internet and no matter the manufacture you never should, they are a privacy nightmare.
Mine sits on HDMI 1, it has receiver for everything else. It has been a great TV. and was hard to argue with the price of the 75" Quantum X at about $2400 in 2019.
Now most likely due to various situations I won't be going with Vizio next time and will be looking at better brands and likely just going with LG. But lets not discount the hardware itself.
The weird thing is if you lucked out like I did and got one of their earliest SmartCast TVs. My SmartCast came from the very apparently shortlived "Chromecast built-in" era and did not receive upgrades or updates to it to make it "smarter".
All my Vizio does is HDMI, QAM tuning, and an input that launches the Chromecast-built-in. They also had a very short-lived Android tablet as a companion device that would be your control surface to cast content to the TV with (installing your streaming apps to it, etc).
That was a good era of Vizio smart TVs. As soon as they actually made the TV do any heavy lifting, it got bad instantly.
I have one of these, but I never even used the Chromecast tablet/remote, I just plugged in an Apple TV 4K and disabled internet access for the TV itself on my router. I imagine this would work for the new even-crappier models as well.
I have two, one which I bought a few months ago. I find the menu navigation to be pretty fast, and it isn’t ad-ridden since I keep it offline (plug an iPhone/iPad/computer). It may not work for everyone, but it works for me.
- first of all, some satellite and DVB-C/T boxes and also TVs such as my ages old Samsung can update their firmware over the air (e.g. [1], page 54). It's possible to use a similar channel to distribute advertising as well.
- embedded WiFi that auto-connects to open networks such as many ISP routers provision in exchange for allowing the line owner access to the provider's hotspot network
- embed a LTE modem
The first way costs money, as renting aerial transmission time is not cheap, LTE modems + data plans are cheaper but still have a hardware cost attached even if manufacturers cut deals with providers, and almost every TV these days has a wifi stack built in.
This. I have a TCL TV which has great picture and nice-enough audio but the "smart" part isn't great at all. Slow, random ads, etc.
It was my first smart tv so I was curious to try it.
Then I went and factory-reset the thing, unplugged the ethernet cable, and now it works like a dumb TV. I'm very happy with it.
It still shows a popup when turned on that I don't have internet, but that's about it. It'll automatically switch to the latest used input when starting up.
The two things that bother me is that it takes ages to boot up if the "quick start-up" is disabled (basically it needs to boot the whole google tv os), and the LED is quite bright at night (but it can be disabled, just not dimmed). It also seems to have no battery for the RTC, so if I unplug it, it will forget the time when I turn it on again (since it doesn't have an internet connection, it never gets to sync).
The TCLs already run AndroidTV, which you can customize, sideload, root, etc. and isn't really the issue. There's also a "fast on" option that will put the TV in standby, so turning it on is almost instant. A full boot only takes 10-20 seconds. But you still, kinda need the firmware updates, because sometimes issues with HDR are only fixed years later.
I think that may be a universal experience with TV repairs, based on a friends experience with a name brand. He had to bring it to a local repair shop where they then held it for over 6 months. Maybe he was just unlucky.
Walmart has a TV brand, and I don't really see why buying (and destroying) Vizio would help them to the tune of $2B. Vizio is one of the better "bargain" brands in my experience.
It would also give Walmart access to the breadth of customer data collected by Vizio’s smart TV platform and the revenue stream created by serving up personalized ads and taking a cut of subscription fees.
This is an interesting angle considering Walmart wants to (and probably already does) make a meaningful amount of revenue from selling ads, like Amazon.
I agree, but still find it weird — Sony use LG (or Samsung, depending on the model) panels in their TVs, so you'd assume that "going to the source" would be better.
Vizio make some of the best soundbars I've owned or experienced... Hopefully that doesn't change if Walmart buys them. I always assumed Vizio was a "Walmart Brand" anyway...
Their soundbars are the best for the price. They are not great, but certainly better than competitors (such as Samsung) if you are in the low end of the market.
Name the last time a multi-billion dollar merger worked for consumers.