Vizio TVs Will Now Require a Walmart Account

After being bought out by Walmart in 2024, “select new Vizio OS TVs“ will require a Walmart account to function properly, a representative told Ars Technica.

Customers already needed a Vizio account to use the smart TV features since 2024, for subscription management, support, and special offers, according to their website.

The brand relies on selling cheap TVs at a loss and making money from ads to make up for it in its business model.

Accounts allow for easy tracking of customers since you have to authenticate to use it, and Vizio are not shy about it given they explicitly list “special offers” as a perk of their accounts.

The fact that they want you to manage your purchases and subscriptions through their accounts as well makes it easy for them to track your media habits.

Vizio accounts will need to transition to the new Walmart accounts.

The representative promised the Walmart account integration is “designed to respect consumer choice and privacy, with data used in aggregated, permissioned, and compliant ways” but didn’t provide any specifics.

While Vizio’s business model was predatory and data-hungry, it was limited to media consumption for the most part which many customers may be ok with.

Walmart‘s position as a general-purpose supermarket puts it in a better position to collect data about your purchases and general consumption habits, which, combined with your media consumption habits, is an absolute goldmine of personal data to harvest for advertising purposes.

Walmart has an ad business that totaled $6.4 billion in 2025, dwarfing Vizio’s measly $115.8 million (compared to it’s hardware business which lost $6.7 million).

Walmart CFO John David Rainey said in an earnings call:

We saw triple-digit growth in advertising with our VIZIO business in the quarter. We've talked a lot about this. This is exciting because it gives us yet another channel to market to our customers.

Walmart is clearly pushing ad revenue hard with Vizio. In an announcement, they brag about their “uniting high-impact storytelling, retail behavior, and closed-loop measurement within a single ecosystem.” Closely following that is an announcement of a partnership with L’Oréal for integrating into “premium content.”

The message is clear: Vizio TVs are not products in the traditional sense, they’re vehicles for advertisers to funnel targeted ads at you.

For years now, smart TVs have been getting more and more privacy-invasive. The most recent controversy involves Automatic Content Recognition (ACR). According to MSN:

ACR runs in the background, taking images and screenshots of the data displayed on your TV, then compares them to a large database to identify what you're watching.

There has been some legal pushback against these practices, but without a wider pushback from politicians, the practice likely won’t stop anytime soon.