Rebecca Day

Walmart had to “unlearn” how to serve customers, Global Chief Technology Officer and Chief Development Officer Suresh Kumar told a National Retail Federation webinar Tuesday. Data and insights “became our lifelines,” he said. He cited machine learning and AI that “helped us make smart decisions a lot faster.” With the holiday sales season ahead, Kumar said the retailer “doubled down” on omnichannel shopping processes that the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated. He cited machine learning, data, edge computing and augmented reality coming together in its app that's used by employees. Online volume scaled exponentially during the pandemic, and machine learning helped deploy stores as fulfillment hubs, said Kumar. Sam’s Club customers use computer vision to shop and check out using smartphones, without using bar codes. Voice technology will have an increasing role at Walmart, said Kumar. It's a natural extension of the user interface that’s more intuitive and efficient than typing, he said. “Voice is going to free us a lot further.”

Prime Day rolled out without incident Monday as Amazon avoided website bottlenecks of previous years with a 3 a.m. EDT start. Detractors warned off shopping on the site, citing reports of poor employee working conditions. New York Mayor Bill de Blasio (D) discouraged shopping at Amazon, telling reporters it's “the day when Amazon tries to outgun every small business.” Prime Day is “a perfect day not to shop Amazon” and instead “keep it local” and “buy from your neighborhood stores,” De Blasio said. An Amazon spokesperson emailed: “Over half of all products purchased on Amazon are sold by small and medium businesses, including more than 40,000 businesses in the State of New York who sold more than 600 million products in one year. That’s why we invest billions in logistics, tools, services, programs, and our teams to help our small and medium business selling partners succeed.” EMarketer estimated Prime Day, which runs through Tuesday, will generate $12 billion in sales worldwide.

Walmart condensed four years of e-commerce evolution into the past year, Walmart U.S. CEO John Furner told a National Retail Federation virtual conference Monday. Retailers said they look to bring customers back to stores, while riding the surge in pandemic-driven e-commerce growth. The public COVID-19 health crisis spurred combining in-store shopping, online shopping and pickup, and delivery to home, Furner said: Walmart wants to be positioned to do “anything a customer needs... at any time.” If consumers are shopping both physically and virtually, they expect goods be “delivered in the way they want it, when they want it,” the executive said. “We have to be able to handle the complexity of the supply chain in the background.”

Google’s first retail store, a LEED Platinum-certified, 5,000-square-foot space in the ground floor of its New York headquarters, opened in low-key fashion Thursday, with a couple dozen visitors waiting when doors opened at 10:02 a.m. Ten minutes beforehand, staffers rolled out an oversized red Google Maps pin to mark the spot, located the next block up and across the street from Apple’s West 14th Street store. Google enthusiast Mukesh Shah, 69, told us he left his home in New Jersey at about 7:45 a.m. to make the opening. He showed us a screen from Google Maps saying his 7,483 photos had 99.7 million views over four years. Shah wasn’t sure if he would buy anything but heard the first thousand visitors to the store would get a gift. Overhearing the conversation, Ron Brayer, who ventured over from the East Village, said, “If it’s a thousand,” he said of the reported gift, “it has to be something small.” Brayer had brought along an unopened Pixel 3a phone, hoping he could trade it in for a product. Breyer got a free Google tote bag with the store location on it. The outlet has vignettes showing Google and Nest products as they would appear in a household. Google staffers are required to wear masks. The unbranded white masks had the text “I’m smiling under here.” Masks are optional for visitors; about half of visitors were wearing them.

“The jury’s still out” on whether streaming is a good business model compared with linear TV, MoffettNathanson's Michael Nathanson told the virtual StreamTV Show. The analyst cited steep investments that streaming market leader Netflix has had to make in content to maintain its subscriber base, and now competing media companies going direct to consumer “have to spend to catch up.” The “negative cycle” in content spending depresses return on invested capital, he said (see here for the 1 p.m. panel Tuesday). Streaming is a good business model “if you can scale it,” but “that requires a ton of spending in advance and the hope that you’re not too late to the game,” he said, and “the hope that you can raise pricing” and learn to “live with churn.” Netflix didn't comment Wednesday. It’s hard to raise pricing in the streaming market, said Nathanson, noting Netflix has implemented price increases over time. “Price increases are a real challenge.”

About 1 million ATSC 3.0 TVs were sold to date, with 3 million-4 million expected to be installed in homes by year-end, said Pearl TV Managing Director Anne Schelle in an interview Monday. “This really is the year of awareness.” Six new U.S. metropolitan 3.0 markets will come on air this summer: Charlotte, Atlanta, Sacramento, Washington, D.C., Orlando and Baltimore, she said.

Apple TV+ leads over-the-top streaming services in monthly active churn at 15.6%, Verimatrix Product Management Director Sebastian Braun told a Parks Associates webinar. NBCUniversal’s Peacock (not including the free tier) was second at 9.5%, followed by Showtime (8.8%), Starz (8.4%), HBO Max (6.7%), CBS All Access (5.9%), Hulu (5.2%), Disney+ (4.3%) and Netflix (2.5%), he said Wednesday. Apple didn't comment Thursday. The average Netflix subscription is 48 months, Parks' Liam Gaughan told the virtual event. “Content is king,” said Braun, saying services with lower churn are those that own, produce and distribute content. Calling churn “unavoidable,” Braun noted consumers subscribe to an average of about five services, vs. three on Jan. 1, 2020. Parks data showed 26% of subscribers quit a service to cut expenses, the same as those ending a subscription because they finished watching a series. One trend to emerge from the COVID-19 pandemic was trial-hopping, said Matt Smith, Symphony MediaAI vice president-business development. He cited a “big swath of users” binge-watching every show of a particular series during a trial, then “jumping off the platform.”

Many advertisers are allocating more of their budget mixes to streaming at a faster rate than pre-pandemic, correlating with the rise in over-the-top viewing, Chief Financial Officer Steve Louden told an investor conference. A third or more TV viewing is on streaming devices, he said Monday. The traditional advertising upfront process lagged that pace until COVID-19, when advertisers didn’t want to lock up their budgets six to 12 months in advance “with a lot of strings attached,” he said. “They pulled back to have more flexibility.” They wanted to see more definitive analyses on the return on investment of marketing dollars, and average revenue per user is “increasing nicely” and is still in “early innings,” he said. On Roku’s April purchase of Nielsen’s video automatic content recognition technology (see 2104160009), Louden said having ACR data under its control was important long term “so we can sell ACR audience guarantees.”

New FaceTime features are designed to address limitations in video calling to make interactions more natural. Spatial Audio, introduced last month in Apple Music, will help FaceTime conversations “flow as easily as they do face to face,” Senior Vice President-Software Engineering Craig Federighi told Apple’s virtual Worldwide Developers Conference Monday. Apple is extending FaceTime calls outside the ecosystem, letting Apple customers send links to Windows and Android users. They can send FaceTime links in messages, email, WhatsApp or in a calendar invite, said Federighi. Apple named Disney+, ESPN+, HBO Max, Hulu, MasterClass, Paramount+, Pluto TV, TikTok, NBA and Twitch as services integrating SharePlay into their apps. The 75-million track music catalog will be available in Lossless, the company said.

Xperi’s Perceive, which is developing edge-based machine-learning technology, had hoped to have products by year-end, but its customers have been affected by chip shortages, the unit's Vice President-Marketing David McIntyre told us. “The biggest issue is, lead times have gotten a little longer.” Its customers “have to assemble chips for many people, and they can only release the product with the slowest chip that shows up,” he said. Shortages have stretched timelines “a little bit,” but Perceive’s Ergo chip isn't affected, he said. Xperi CEO Jon Kirchner said Perceive is initially targeting security cameras, with future uses in mobile, wearables and elsewhere. First products are due in early 2022, he said.