Walmart is creating a joint venture with New York-based “interactive storytelling” startup Eko; sources say the investment with Eko is worth $250M
Walmart is going Hollywood. — The world's largest retailer, in a constant battle with its rival Amazon …
Context & Ripple Effects
The Eko joint venture lands mid-way through a deliberate Walmart push into non-retail assets during 2018: two months earlier it launched Walmart eBooks with Rakuten Kobo, and within weeks of this deal it would buy the assets of Art.com. Each move adds a content or digital category where Amazon already has an entrenched franchise.
Eko gives Walmart something those deals don't: an in-house studio for interactive, presumably shoppable video. That capability is the connective tissue between Walmart's storefront and the media ambitions it would later make explicit in talks with Paramount, Disney, and Comcast about bundling streaming into Walmart+.
First-order effects
- Walmart gains a $250M-funded interactive-video operation inside the company, while Eko secures capital plus access to the world's largest retailer as both a distribution channel and a test bed for shoppable formats.
- Amazon now faces a rival funding original interactive content rather than merely reselling media, raising the bar on the content-commerce playbook Amazon pioneered with its own ecosystem.
Second-order effects
- Interactive video positions Walmart to sell not just products but attention — a path that runs directly to its later ad-business buildout, including the acquisition of Vibe.co into Walmart Connect, where brand advertisers fund the content layer.
- Suppliers and brands selling through Walmart gain a new premium placement format, shifting merchandising negotiations toward whoever controls the video experience rather than shelf space alone.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, large retailers stop being pure merchants and become media companies whose ad and content arms subsidize retail margins — the structure Walmart was still negotiating toward years later when exploring a streaming bundle for Walmart+.
- Content ownership becomes a competitive moat in e-commerce: retailers without studios or ad platforms risk renting their customer relationships from platforms like Amazon that control both.
The trend: Retailers are acquiring content-production and ad-tech capabilities to convert shopping traffic into media businesses, with Walmart's Eko venture an early marker on the road to Walmart Connect and Walmart+.