The biggest structural story in CTV this week is Walmart's reported ~$1.4 billion acquisition of Vibe.co, a self-serve CTV advertising platform. The deal, reported by the Wall Street Journal, is a direct statement of intent: Walmart wants to own the full-funnel CTV stack, from retail media data to streaming inventory, competing head-on with Amazon's increasingly dominant ad ecosystem. Vibe.co's self-serve model gives Walmart a scalable entry point for mid-market advertisers who previously lacked access to premium CTV inventory tied to purchase-intent data.
Simultaneously, Sky's acquisition of ITV in the UK creates a combined streaming and broadcast powerhouse that will consolidate significant CTV inventory under one roof in Europe. For programmatic buyers, this means fewer independent premium publishers and more negotiating leverage concentrated in larger platform owners — a trend that mirrors what's already happened in the US market. Together, these two deals in a single week underscore that CTV consolidation is accelerating globally, and the window for independent CTV platforms to operate at scale is narrowing.