TikTok, Friction, and the Future of Video Shopping
I’ve been in the TV technology business for nearly 25 years, and no meme is more tired than these three words: Jennifer Aniston’s sweater. It’s shorthand for the television industry’s decades-long, unsuccessful search for the ultimate connection between viewers and advertisers—the ability to drive an instant transaction, while watching.
That dream still hasn’t materialized, though signs of promise remain. In the meantime, something else has.
At Streaming Media 2025 in Santa Monica, my panel with Dallas Lawrence (Telly), Bryan Moore (TalkShopLive), Sarge Sargent, and David Grant (Favored.Live) explored the hottest video shopping trend around, and it’s not what TV techies have been building.
Traditional TV Shopping: Small but Real
Even if shoppable TV hasn’t gone mainstream, investment continues.
Roku and Shopify first partnered in July 2023 and expanded the deal in September 2024, so Shopify merchants could sell directly through TV using Roku Action Ads. Viewers simply press “OK” to buy via Roku Pay.
Research funded by Roku and Dentsu in June 2025 found that over half of streamers would be interested in adding advertised products to a digital shopping cart or purchasing directly from their TV using pre-saved credentials.
Longtime partner QVC has also boosted its presence on Roku’s home and navigation pages. That said, it’s worth noting that the equity market cap of QVC has gone from $5 billion in 2020 to roughly $100 million in 2025.
Amazon, the clear leader in end-to-end TV shopping capabilities, extended its shoppable-video format to Prime Video Connected TV environments in April 2024. Fire TV users can now add to cart—or send a link to their phone—without leaving a football game. Amazon reported roughly 10 percent increase in year-over-year interactive-ad engagement during the 2024 Black Friday NFL broadcast. But they’ve not disclosed any attributable gross merch value. I suspect the results weren’t worth speaking about.
Meanwhile, Rocket Growth: TikTok, Whatnot, and TalkShopLive
In a different corner of the video shopping universe, news dropped on October 29th about Whatnot’s $225 million Series F funding. That values the livestream phenom at $11.5 billion, and a Fashion Network article reported Whatnot’s gross merchandise value is about to surpass $6 billion in 2025. That’s more than double 2024’s total. 100% growth.
For comparison, eBay Live, launched in 2022, is now considered a bright spot in eBay’s turnaround. There are no published metrics, but the Collectibles segment is estimated at $10B in gross merchandise value and a known strength for eBay Live.
But you’ll have to rewind to 2018 to identify when pioneer Bryan Moore co-invented this category with TalkShopLive, one of the earliest - and today, most successful - infrastructure plays in livestream commerce today.
His platform powers livestreams for Walmart, Condé Nast, Hearst, and NBC Universal, helping best-selling authors, artists and creators sell books, music, beauty, and more.
“I watched livestream shopping take off in Asia and realized we needed to build that experience for the consumer in North America,” Moore said. "So we invented and patented a video player that’s shoppable within the player everywhere it exists. In addition to a marketplace that drives talent programs, we’re also the technology provider for Walmart. We’re distributed off-platform for Amazon and other retailers.”
He gave an example: “On her last livestream shop special, Dolly Parton came on selling her new cookbook with Trisha Yearwood. It streamed on dollyparton.com, trishayearwood.com, todayshow.com, goodhousekeeping.com, and across their social pages. Everyone could watch wherever they were—and she sold three times what she’d sell on a traditional home-shopping network within 30 minutes.”
Bryan also noted the power of the format to generate critical data on viewer preferences to help them optimize their go-forward content strategies. TalkShopLive tracks 220 data interactions within every player to identify “the highest-converting moments of the show.”
Those clips are republished as shorter, shoppable videos.
Moore warns creators not to rely on one algorithm: “If you’re a creator or a brand, you don’t want to be dependent on one social platform. They can change the algorithm. They can disappear. One platform is a tactic; multiple platforms, syndication and post-show activation, that’s a strategy.”
What is Friction: The Real Problem for TV
It was in our prep call that David Grant, CEO of Favored.Live, gave me the single word that defines the challenge of TV Shopping: friction. TV has too much of it.
While you can today buy what you see in some environments, the widely distributed methods are still too clunky. You grab your phone, type a URL, maybe scan a QR code—but the truth is, the majority of humans will give up just thinking about those three methods. Thinking is hard; most viewers quit before they start.
TikTok is different. You’re mesmerized by video, like TV, but your fingers are flicking upward in a rhythmic dopamine loop.
Here’s my personal example: For me, kitesurfing videos are my thing to watch on TikTok.
One night, a creator/kiter popped up selling a world map of the best kitesurfing spots. Two thumb flicks later, I’d bought it. No search. Just PayPal checkout. Done. A true zero-friction environment. Honestly, I was half asleep. But I was delighted when my piece of printed paper showed up six weeks later. It’s since been professionally framed.
“What TikTok is really brilliant at doing,” Grant said, “is the algorithm just knows. You can pour in infinite content, and if you’re in a shopping mindset, it figures that out and sends you a creator pitching a product. If you’re not, it won’t.”
More than two million creators now sell through TikTok Shop, and Grant’s company has activated 730,000 affiliates, generating sales for brands that didn’t even exist a year ago.
He told the story of one Los Angeles fragrance startup:
“We found some people who loved the product, learned how to talk about it live on TikTok, and started going live. That company now does about $2 million a month. They just got acquired by private equity. I’ve got fragrance companies coming to me almost every day asking, ‘Can you sell my product?’ You can only do that with video. You can’t do that with text.”
Imagine selling a fragrance through TV. And without smell-o-vision. Storytelling is powerful and authentic influencer style storytelling is rapidly scaling in a way that is changing the way products are sold, with talented humans answering questions about merchandise in real-time.
Rethinking the TV: AI Hub in the Living Room?
Dallas Lawrence, Chief Strategy Officer at groundbreaking TV OEM Telly, argues that the television hasn’t had the right form-factor for frictionless commerce. The single-screen experience is the real roadblock.
“You’re not going to stop watching your favorite NBA game to buy LeBron’s shoes,” he said. “But if you have a second screen attached to it, you might just do that.”
Telly’s dual-screen TV combines a 55-inch 4K HDR display with a persistent lower panel for data, offers, and commerce. The second screen enables a key piece of frictionless commerce –- it happens without any interruption of the viewing experience, whether the viewer is watching the content or a commercial.
In fact, he added: “By the way, when a national Mazda ad airs, we can instantly show a localized companion ad on the second screen—clickable, measurable, and personalized. Engagement goes through the roof.”
Lawrence said the next hurdle is psychological. “Training a human to make a purchase on their television is a completely new path to purchase,” he said. “The more times a household is presented with a shoppable moment, the more likely they are to click again and again. We’re literally training new behavior.”
Ok so how much does this amazing dual-screen TV gadget cost? Amazingly, nothing. Consumers get the set for free, by sharing household data. In return, Telly can provide advertisers what Lawrence calls “the most powerful data and advertising business television has ever seen.”
And along with that, at Telly, the TV can become a powerful intelligent hub.
“All we’ve innovated in TV for the last five years is size and price,” Lawrence said. “If we flip that and put as much computing power in it as your phone—camera, microphone, AI—the screen can become the platform you live your life by.”
Today the Telly team is already testing an AI-generated daily show personalized to each household.
“We know 160-plus things about your household,” he explained. “So when you turn your TV on, you’ll get a short show with news and recommendations relevant to you. We’re not far from creating that one show for you every single day.”
For viewers, that means fewer irrelevant ads, more useful offers, and the ability to act instantly—without leaving the couch. The implications for advertising are profound.
“The winners will be the platforms with first-party relationships where consumers share data in exchange for a better, more relevant experience.”
After two decades chasing the big screen for commerce use cases, we seem to be at a tipping point for video shopping.
Livestream innovators like Favored.Live and TalkShopLive are riding an organic wave of social shopping. Telly is presenting a dual-screen shopping experience with a smart, synchronized second-screen that doesn’t interrupt the live / linear feed.
How will these forces impact the more traditional TV shopping innovations involving a remote control and a TV device that also holds your payment information? We’ll all have to stay tuned to find out.
Brian Ring is a streaming technology expert with deep experience in full-stack GTM, Product Market Fit, and Revenue Growth motions. He’s worked with Amagi, Synamedia, MediaKind, Mux, Ateme and many others. His expertise includes all segments of video tech infrastructure including content creation, management, distribution, and monetization. Current consulting projects are focused on LLM-integrated media workflows; the CTV programmatic stack; the next evolution of FAST.
Brian is an active thought leader, writing and moderating panels for Streaming Media, NAB Show, Stream TV Show, Sports Video Group, and other major industry events.
He holds an MBA from The Wharton School and a BA in Psychology from UC Berkeley.
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