Vizio Sees Payment Platform Enabling Sports Betting, Food Delivery

The smart TV “is basically a computer on the wall,” said Vizio Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend at an investor conference last week, discussing the growing role of the connected TV (CTV) in the home. Commenting on the recent launch of the company’s Vizio Account payment platform, Townsend said the platform in the early stages is a way for customers to consolidate their premium streaming accounts in one payment location. In the future, the company wants the platform to enable “interaction, transactions and commerce.” The goal is to expand the TV’s role from a device that simply displays video to one that enables commerce activity including sports betting and food delivery orders. He also envisioned the platform enabling a personal training session “where you’re connected to that TV with a smartwatch, and there are sensors, and they know your telemetry,” he said. Vizio wants to “facilitate the transaction from a financial standpoint.” Townsend said Vizio is “laying the track in these early days of where the CTV business is headed. The smart TV “won’t just be limited to streaming video and being an entertainment device. It’s going to be a personal life-enhancing device.” Vizio’s targeting data with its automatic content recognition technology is key to driving ad growth, Townsend said. The ability to have a “complete data set on viewership and behavior” has become very valuable to Vizio on two fronts, Townsend said. It allows the company to sell targeted advertising for what it says is a better user experience with more relevant ads, enabling a higher cost per thousand impressions. The company also licenses portions of data to companies including Nielsen, Comscore, VideoAmp and 605 that are building measurement solutions for the CTV market using Vizio's data. “When Nielsen thinks about how to measure around traditional linear TV and CTV, our data is increasingly becoming the cornerstone to that product,” Townsend said.