Rebecca Day

Summit Wireless changed its name to WiSA Technologies “to reinforce the brand of WiSA for the world and the consumer,” said CEO Brett Moyer Friday on the company’s Q4 earnings call.

LAS VEGAS – Home technology vendors, squeezed by chip shortages and shipping logjams, are battling to meet continued dealer demand for home audio, networking gear and other products they need to finish custom projects, several told us at the ProSource spring Summit this week.

Walmart, as part of its expanding reach into healthcare, announced two exclusive offerings Thursday on caregiving and vitamin subscriptions. BetterUp for Caregivers gives caregivers access to live group coaching circles, led by a professional coach, and includes tools and a community for support for the 50 million Americans that are caregivers. The Easy Vitamin plan is a 28-day supply of vitamins that’s said to make customized nutrition “accessible and more affordable.” Walmart recommends vitamins to customers who answer questions about age, gender, stress and energy levels, health, exercise and diet and then provide their email address to the retailer. After we filled out the questions, Walmart suggested a multivitamin at $32.95 per 28-day period, along with four supplements ranging $2.49-$4.99 each. Subscribers save 10% at checkout, it said. Speaking to a Bank of Americas Securities conference Wednesday, Walmart Chief Financial Officer Brett Biggs noted healthcare on its own is a “pretty big business” for the company that ties in well “with how we interact with our customers,” along with financial services, digital advertising, data monetization and other areas. Walmart trialed clinics and diagnostics labs, he noted. On future healthcare plans, Biggs said, “I wouldn’t anticipate us doing something that would surprise investors or analysts” as to how it would tie into Walmart’s business.

The Netflix “first-mover advantage” and its large subscriber base gives it a “nearly insurmountable competitive advantage” over streaming peers, Wedbush analyst Michael Pachter wrote investors Wednesday, upgrading shares to “neutral” from “underperform.” Netflix “appears to have hit a ceiling" on subscribers in the U.S. and Canada “and is pulling new levers to lower churn,” he said, citing a new season of the Russian Doll series in Q2 and the final season of Stranger Things scheduled to straddle Q2 and Q3. Subscription price increases will likely fuel added content production and growth in other regions, Pachter said. Future subscriber growth will occur mostly in less developed regions at much lower subscription prices, while subscribers in saturated markets pay higher rates to fund new content. Wedbush expects Netflix to deliver profit growth as long as it can continue raising subscription prices, “but competition may create a price ceiling.”

LAS VEGAS -- The big picture for the chip supply chain is expected to improve midyear, but ProSource dealers are battling major shortages, we heard at the ProSource Summit here this week. Some have lost projects, and all have had to come up with workarounds to get product they need, often not the product originally specified.

Virtual MVPD fuboTV is experimenting with interactivity, said CEO David Gandler on a BMO Digital Advertising Summit webcast. As consumers interact with fuboTV programming, they will be able to respond to calls to action, he said Wednesday. He envisioned viewers watching a high-profile game and having a Buffalo Wild Wings ad appear with a clickable “Buy” button that pulls down a menu for order placement. The process would be facilitated by customer information on file: “We know your address,” he said.

LAS VEGAS -- ProSource volume grew 24% year on year in 2021, and volume rebate transactions were up 51%, said Vice President-Business Development Andy Orozco, opening the group’s spring Summit Sunday. The growth in volume rebate dollars “means we're growing our business with our vendor partners," he said.

Disney’s announcement Friday that it’s adding an ad-supported Disney+ VOD service in the U.S. late this year -- and internationally in 2023 -- shows “they no longer believe they can hit their 2024 subscriber goals without an ad-supported Disney+ tier,” Lightshed analyst Richard Greenfield wrote investors Friday. Disney called the AVOD offering a “building block” in its path to achieving a long-term target of 230 million-260 million Disney+ subscribers by fiscal year 2024. It ended Q1 FY 2022, ended Jan. 1, with 196.4 million subscribers, 42.9 million domestic. “Expanding access to Disney+ to a broader audience at a lower price point is a win for everyone -- consumers, advertisers, and our storytellers,” said Kareem Daniel, chairman-Disney Media and Entertainment Distribution. Details and pricing will be announced later, Disney said. Offering a lower priced subscription streaming service, supplemented with ads, can expand a subscription-based VOD service’s total addressable market, Greenfield said, but "the far larger question is whether it is the ‘right’ long-term strategic decision in the intensifying war for time and attention." Greenfield cited data from Antenna showing 32% of SVOD sign-ups last year were for ad-supported tiers, up from 19% in 2020, but he noted AVOD tiers have 50%-70% of subscriber bases for services with hybrid ad-supported tiers. “The clear implication is that if you give consumers the option to save money with a lower-cost ad-supported tier, the majority will take that option,” said the analyst. Greenfield said Disney's move could make tech platforms that don’t offer an ad-based tier -- Netflix, Amazon Prime Video and Apple TV+ -- “that much more compelling.” Disney+ is “already low-priced” at $7.99 with a “robust” content slate coming in second-half 2022 and 2023, he said, adding, “Disney has added WAY more subscribers than anyone thought possible when it launched in 2019.”

Vizio returned to “aggressive promotions” last month after shipping 700,000 fewer TVs in Q4 than a year earlier, said Chief Financial Officer Adam Townsend on the company’s Thursday earnings call. The company shipped 1.5 million TVs in Q4, down from 2.2 million in the 2020 quarter. Device revenue dropped 22% year on year to $523.7 million, it said. Total revenue fell 14% to $628.8 million. For the year, revenue grew 4% to $2.1 billion, said the company.Shares plunged 16.3% Friday, closing at $11.08.

Best Buy's Q4 fiscal 2022 comparable sales slipped 2.3%, with revenue dropping more than expected to $16.4 billion for the quarter ended Jan. 29, the company said Thursday. On an earnings call, CEO Corie Barry cited more constrained inventory than forecast, “including some high-demand holiday items,” and reduced store hours due to the COVID-19 omicron variant.