Tastemade marked a deal with Walmart that will see members of the retail giant’s Walmart+ program get access to the niche streamer’s Tastemade+, a subscription service offering recipes, food and lifestyle shows, at no cost for a limited time.
Under the new partnership, announced Tuesday, Walmart+ members will get six free months of Tastemade+ - usually priced at $5.99 per month on a standalone basis - featuring cooking and lifestyle shows that are available both ad-free and on-demand. A Walmart+ plan costs $12.95 per month or $98 for an annual subscription.
Tastemade+ offers access to over 12,000 recipes, cooking and DIY videos, weekly meal plans and grocery lists, virtual recipe boxes, and events, among other features.
The partners suggested a complementary fit for the two services, as Tastemade is known for cooking and home project programming while Walmart+ membership offers free delivery for goods purchased from the retailer – enabling viewers “to seamlessly shop and bring their meals & home projects to life.”
During a panel session earlier this month at the CIMM Summit, Tastemade GM of Streaming Evan Bregman shared a statistic of the company’s engaged audience, saying that 80% of Tastemade viewers actually go out and make something (be it a recipe or home craft project) based on what they watched.
In addition to its flagship food-focused free streaming channel, Tastemade also counts a travel, home & design and Tastemade en Espanol streaming channels. Through those, it has staked ground in the free ad-supported streaming TV (FAST) space, and according to Bregman, is one of the most distributed among FASTs and MVPDs. However, with a Tastemade+ subscription it offers ad-free access to content, and in announcing the Walmart partnership pointed to growing consumption of on-demand.
“We are thrilled to unlock the next iteration of our long-standing collaboration with Walmart by bringing Tastemade+ access to Walmart+ members,” said Taylor Shwide, distribution & partnerships manager at Tastemade, in a statement. “We are in the business of turning viewers into doers, and we know that on-demand content continues to grow in popularity. Through this partnership we are able to unlock a whole suite of recipes and content for an entirely new fanbase in a unique way.”
Tastemade counts a global audience of more than 300 million monthly viewers across all major digital, mobile, and streaming TV platforms - capturing 700 million minutes watched each month.
And while the company touts an engaged audience, partners are key to expanding its base. To that end, Tastemade is one of the independent streaming companies that formed the Independent Streaming Alliance (ISA) in June. ISA is comprised of 10 leading indie streaming players that together boast an aggregate reach of 15% of the U.S., based on a commissioned study conducted and released this month by measurement vendor iSpot.
In another move to reach more audiences, Tastemade in September partnered with MyBundle, joining the aggregator’s roster of streaming services made available to the company's over 180 broadband service provider partners as an option to serve their respective customers. And Tastemade isn’t the first streaming service to mark an integration with Walmart+ membership. Paramount+ last year inked a deal with the retailer, incorporating the Paramount+ Essentials streaming service plan as a perk of Walmart+ for no additional cost.
As streaming services reach maturation and look for new ways to reach audiences and retain subscribers, strategic bundling has cropped up as one avenue.
In an earlier deeper dive on the potential for streaming bundles, Circana’s John Buffone forecast experimentation in this area as a key theme over the next few years. He expects streaming providers to test out and refine more sophisticated product packaging and bundling or pairing strategies to see what works best to meet various stakeholders’ objectives – namely reducing churn or acquiring subscribers on the streaming side.
In terms of retailers, streaming platform Roku has also forged partnerships, not with bundles but for data and shoppable TV integrations. In March, Roku teamed up with Best Buy to leverage first-party retail shopper data to help advertisers better target ads on the streaming platform and perform closed loop measurements. It also fired up its own shoppable TV pilot program with Walmart in 2022, enabling viewers to purchase goods from the retailer directly through their TV with the click of a remote. More recently in April, Roku partnered with Instacart to pair viewership data with purchase data insights to measure the impact of TV streaming ads on product sales for advertisers.