More 2019 predictions: Walmart buys Roku, tough year ahead for Snap and Twitter

Some pundits like to wait until a new year has begun to trot out their predictions for the year ahead.
So, here’s a roundup of predictions from a few Johnny-come-latelies.

Walmart Buys Roku

BTIG media analyst Richard Greenfield thinks Walmart will buy streaming video platform Roku.
Walmart’s first foray into the online video market with its 2010 acquisition of Vudu has been a “clear failure,” Greenfield said in a Jan. 7 blog post. Now the retailer is exploring its own subscription video-on-demand service, but is late to the market.
“If the goal is to increase time spent with Walmart to drive retail spending (as Prime Video does for Amazon), we believe acquiring Roku could be Walmart’s most compelling entry point into streaming video,” Greenfield said.

Snap, Twitter stocks cut in half

Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at the NYU Stern School of Business, sees a tough year ahead for social media firms Snap and Twitter. In a Jan. 13 post on Seeking Alpha, he said both companies will have their valuations cut in half this year.
When he published his article, Snap was trading at $6.28 a share (it was 5.64 at Wednesday’s market close) and Twitter was at $32.87 a share (now 32.47).
He called Snap “the walking dead.” Meanwhile, Twitter has seen its content overrun by bots and foreign agents, Galloway said.

A Big 3 network abandons its evening news broadcast

Robert Silvershein, a senior adviser with research firm TDG, thinks one of the Big 3 TV networks (ABC, CBS and NBC) will announce the end of its evening news broadcast after the 2020 election.
“2019 will be the year that TV network executives are forced to come to grips with the financial realities of their business,” he wrote in a blog post. “A television product that is expensive to make, with a 40-year decline in ratings, and a median viewer age of 60+ should have been cancelled a long time ago. But the prestige of owning a #1 evening news broadcast has been a legacy difficult to part with.”

Related articles:

Top 20 celebrities predicted to die in 2019 (Jan. 1, 2019)

2019 will be big year for plant-based meat, beer-brewing machines and ‘Harry Potter’ mobile game (Jan. 2, 2019)

2019 psychic predictions for Donald Trump, Taylor Swift and Apple (Jan. 14, 2019)

Photo: Limited-edition Roku SE streaming player sold exclusively at Walmart stores for Black Friday 2018. (Roku)