VIZIO Founder William Wang’s Front-Row Seat On TV’s Transformation

Here on the eve of the near-endless Consumer Electronics Show, the perpetually renewing annual showcase for everything gadget and gizmo, it can be hard to remember what televisions, that omnipresent electronic hearth of our modern era, looked like just 20 years ago.

Even small sets were bulky, boxy beasts that ate up a considerable corner of the living room. Big screens were a luxury reserved for those with big rooms and bigger wallets. Most homes still had “standard definition” screens, delivering a dim, low-res picture that these days might make you schedule an eye exam. The first flat screens, using now-outmoded technologies, cost many thousands of dollars. The TVs of the day could take a signal from an antenna, a cable set-top box or game console, but…not much else.

These days, that’s all changed. You can get a 4K-resolution (or even 8K!) Ultra High Definition screen, 55, 65 or more inches across and no thicker than a deck or two of cards, for as little as a few hundred dollars. High-end audio and video enhancements such as Dolby Vision, Dolby Atmos, and HDR 10+ are common.

Even more importantly, it’s nearly impossible to buy a TV of any size that doesn’t have the built-in WiFi capability, processing smarts, and on-screen interface to access, display and manage Internet-based streaming-video apps and services, Internet browsers, music, workouts, games, Zoom calls, and much else. A quarter-century in the making, the Smart TV revolution has pretty much been won, even if it’s not done yet.

One important player in this transformation has been upstart American TV and soundbar manufacturer VIZIO, which just marked its 20th anniversary. I recently had a long interview with William Wang, VIZIO’s founder, CEO and chairman, about that transformation, his decades-long quest to make the household’s best and biggest screen the center of entertainment and what’s still to come, in what will be a two-part interview.

Since its 2002 founding after a near-tragedy for its founder, VIZIO has become a power in its home market, selling a combined 100 million TVs and soundbars in the U.S., where it is No. 2 in TV sales and tops in soundbars.

Along the way, the only U.S.-based TV maker has clocked a string of industry firsts in a brutally competitive sector while selling a range of well-regarded, good-quality sets featuring most of the latest features, at prices among the sector’s best values.

With its SmartCast operating system and WatchFree+ service, VIZIO also has become a notable player in the TV industry’s hottest trend of the past couple of years: running a data-driven, ad-supported streaming-video platform. Now, even long-time partner NetflixNFLX
, among others, has embraced advertising.

Wang has been making and selling various sorts of video screens since 1968, when he graduated from the University of Southern California with an electrical engineering degree. His first job was in customer service for a company that made computer monitors, when those screens were miserable things to behold, typically grim beige boxes with monochrome green or amber type on black backgrounds.

That first job taught Wang the importance of taking care of customers. It also fueled a desire to make better-looking screens that were kinder to a customer’s eyes, and pocketbook, and that unlocked more possible uses. Four years later, Wang started his own computer monitor company.

Fast forward a decade, to 2000. Wang was in Taiwan, meeting with investors for yet another monitor maker. But he almost didn’t make it back to his Southern California home.

“A little after takeoff, the plane crashed into a construction site,” said Wang. “The entire time, all I could think about was how I had to survive, how I would do anything to get home.”

In the chaos, Wang made his way to the front of the plane, got the door open and jumped out.

“I am beyond grateful to be here today,” said Wang. “Finally getting home after the accident was one of the best moments of my life. I remember thinking how much I loved being home, and from this thought, VIZIO was born.”

Wang had a newfound appreciation for home life, and for making it better. It was a propitious time to shift his focus to making better-looking and more useful televisions.

To spur investment and free up scarce spectrum for other uses, the U.S. government had begun force-feeding a digital makeover on broadcasters. The resulting high-def digital video signals and new display technologies promised to bust the box, creating the potential for far sharper and more capable flat screens.

Two years after the plane crash, and Wang’s pivot, VIZIO’s first screens hit the markets, led by a high-definition, 42-inch plasma flat screen. The company also created a rear-projection big screen.

“It was huge,” Wang said of those oversized rear-projection screens. “I recall that we made 2,000 models, and I think 2,000 of those came back (from retailers). Nobody wanted the big, bulky stuff anymore.”

But the flat screen was a hit. Wang’s original vision for VIZIO, then called just V, was to make quality home-entertainment tech accessible and affordable for most households.

Up to then, big-screen TVs were very much the province of high-end audio/visual enthusiasts and the wealthy, much like audiophile sound systems. Even a decade ago, an 85-inch 4K display cost as much as $40,000 (these days you can buy a far smarter and functional descendant for as little as $1,300, thanks to far more efficient and cost-effective manufacturing techniques).

By contrast with those pricey wallet busters, VIZIO focused on more affordably priced flat screens whose quality also could earn critical praise. While engineering for both price and quality was a significant achievement for a startup in a highly competitive sector, VIZIO’s most notable innovation might be its early embrace of Smart TVs and dogged persistence to pack a lot of technology into a set without breaking the bank.

Wang first experimented with making a smart TV in the late 1990s, spending “a lot of money” on a pilot project at his monitor company. But the technology, especially given the era’s pokey connectivity, just wasn’t ready for high-end video. It would take another decade before the tech finally caught up.

“So it took a while but that did come true,” Wang said. VIZIO had worked with computer maker Gateway and later with a small company acquired by Yahoo, which by then was pushing into online entertainment under senior executives with lengthy TV backgrounds.

VIZIO was already the top U.S. flat-screen seller, but it was time to add some brains to take advantage of what Yahoo was trying to do, as well as Netflix and Hulu, which both launched streaming services in 2007, and YouTube.

By 2010, VIZIO launched the industry’s first smart TV, though viewing options were still mostly Netflix, Hulu and YouTube. Video delivered over the internet wasn’t yet a great experience, Wang said, with “questionable” picture quality thanks to internet speeds in most households that were still too slow and unreliable.

“We knew as WiFi gained adoption that it would be a critical component to delivering a TV experience that is integrated with other devices in the home,” Wang said.

For all that era’s tech limitations, Wang estimated as many as 2 million of those early VIZIO smart TVs are still in use, and still getting updated with new services through another big innovation, its SmartCast interface.

That was another crucial shift for VIZIO, and the industry. Having an internet-connected, regularly updated interface that could navigate apps in effect turned the home’s biggest screen into a non-mobile version of the iPhone, with much of the same flexibility and power, and ability to provide customized programming and ad experiences.

“In the very beginning, in 1998, when we built the first smart TV, I really thought that we could sell pizza,” Wang said. “That’s how to monetize.”

It’s been a quarter century since that first era of trying to sell pizza and Jennifer Aniston’s sweater, but here we are. E-commerce and advertising are increasingly at the center of the streaming TV universe, especially now that even Netflix and Disney have launched ad-supported service tiers, and Apple TV+ is selling ads around its live sports programming.

“The last six years or so, we’ve been turning into a media platform,” Wang said.

The launch of VIZIO’s ad-supported WatchFree+ service, which features hundreds of channels of ad-supported linear and on-demand channels and is built into SmartCast, shifted the hardware company toward becoming more of a media distributor.

That shift has pushed VIZIO to become a software company, a programming platform, and an advertising company. The transformation has become profitable over time. It now generates hundreds of millions in annual revenue by helping media networks and creators find audiences and by giving brands a “direct-to-device” connection to those audiences.

Along the way, Wang bet big on data-focused corporate acquisitions in the 2010s, particularly of Buddy Media, a key building block for what became SmartCast. VIZIO also bought another small company it had been working with, Cognitive, which is credited with inventing a form of automated content recognition, or ACR, technology. Cognitive was later renamed Inscape.

Those new capabilities meant that with an Internet connection, ACR, and a customer’s explicit opt-in, VIZIO screens could gather and aggregate anonymous data about what shows are actually being watched, and when.

The scale and precision of that data were a massive shift from the watch diaries and small-sample surveys of the Nielsen era. These days, some 21 million households have opted into VIZIO’s ACR data, which is crucial for new measurement companies and a key part of the experience of watching a VIZIO TV.

At the same time, the once-limited world of online video streaming has exploded into a bewildering panoply of choices. SmartCast curates access to more than 150 premium streaming services, including all the big ones such as Disney+, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime Video, and HBO Max, as well as dozens of smaller providers serving many different niche audiences.

“In many ways VIZIO was built for this moment, where people are streaming first and integrating the biggest device in the home into their daily lives, in new ways,” Wang said. “We will continue to execute on our mission to provide the best experience possible in the home, at a great price. You will see us continue to evolve what the TV is and can do in the home to improve the experience.”

As Wang suggests, all the changes so far are hardly the end of TV’s transformation, and of its future. For that, I’ll circle back with part two of my conversation with Wang, as we talk about what’s next for TV and the Smart Home. Stay tuned.