Elon Musk really, really, really wants to make video a thing on X. He’s been courting MrBeast for months, trying to convince YouTube‘s most-subscribed-to creator to post his much-viewed content on X (with…some degree of success?).
Now he claims to be going after YouTube’s living room TV viewership: According to a quote-retweet from Musk, X is apparently working on an app that’ll let users watch long-form video content on their smart TVs.
He quote-retweeted someone named “DogeDesigner,” whose original tweet included a stock image of a TV screen and the sentence, “You can soon watch your favorite long form videos directly on your SmartTVs.”
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“Coming soon,” Musk commented.
Coming soon https://t.co/JlnlSL7eS9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2024
He didn’t give any details about the app, but Engadget reports it’ll roll out on Samsung TVs and Amazon Fire TVs. When? We don’t know. How long do videos have to be to get on the app? We also don’t know. Will X do any kind of content moderating to ensure copyrights aren’t violated and that gore and abuse videos don’t show up on your living room TV? Yep–we don’t know.
We’re guessing Musk hopes the app will follow in the footsteps of connected TV apps like YouTube’s (which generates one billion hours of watch time per day) and be a revenue stream for X. The site has struggled since he took over, with a major advertiser exit in November after Musk endorsed an antisemitic conspiracy theory, and a 30% drop in usage so far this year.
This announcement follows X’s introduction of a YouTube Select-esque program called Creator Targeting, where it’ll let brands and marketers “run ads against a curated list of premium content creators.”
