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The streaming services will be offered to customers at a rate of $13.99 a month.
By Erik Hayden
Executive Editor, Business
Just over a month after Walmart closed a $2.3 billion deal to acquire Vizio to help further its ambitions in the connected TV advertising space, the retailer has unveiled a new bundling plan for consumers with two smaller streaming platforms.
AMC+ and Starz will be bundled to Vizio customers at a rate of $13.99 a month (about $7 less than it’d cost if the subscriptions were purchased separately), the company said on Monday. Vizio, which disclosed in December that it had 19 million accounts for its SmartCast operating system, is being leveraged by Walmart on a battlefield that also includes Roku, Samsung, Apple TV and Amazon’s Fire TV.
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AMC+, which features titles like Anne Rice’s Mayfair Witches, thriller series Dark Winds as well as The Walking Dead franchise and hits like Mad Men, reported about 11.8 million subscribers as a standalone service in AMC Networks’ latest earning disclosure in November. And Starz, home to the Power franchise and Outlander, has 12.73 million over-the-top (streaming) subscribers for its service, so both are looking to leverage additional partners to help scale up.
“Our slate of hit originals targeting women and underrepresented audiences and expansive collection of movies make Starz an ideal complement to any bundle offering,” said Starz Networks president Alison Hoffman. “Bundles like this elevate the streaming experience for customers and enable us to broaden our reach across connected devices.”
AMC Networks’ partnerships exec Amy Leasca added, “Our focus continues to be on making this great content available to audiences wherever they might choose to watch and partnerships like this one with Vizio and Starz are an important part of that strategy.”
Bundling options have become increasingly a go-to for streaming services to prevent subscriber churn as well as provide greater reach for platforms that aren’t at the scale of Netflix (282 million global subscribers). And Vizio’s corporate parent, Walmart, has also looked to ink opportunistic deals, offering Paramount+ (which has 72 million subs as a standalone streaming service) as a bonus for subscribers to its Amazon Prime-like service Walmart+.
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