Since Elon Musk acquired Twitter (now X) in October 2022, he has thrown a lot of things at the wall and hoped they stuck (read: make money). Now, he’s taking a page from YouTube and launching a video streaming service on the platform, SamMobile reports. Musk announced that the feature was “Coming soon” in a quote tweet from the DogeDesigner’s account: “You can soon watch your favorite X long form videos directly on your SmartTVs.”
X will launch a dedicated app that allows users to watch these videos on Samsung TV and Amazon’s Fire TV. Musk recently said X would be a “video-first” platform moving forward, and this development shows that this will translate beyond the small content boxes typically available on feeds to a bigger screen. At the time, Musk also claims that eight out of ten times a person visits X, they’re watching videos.
The decision follows bad news for X, with a recent Edison Research report finding that 2024 has seen a 30 percent drop in the site’s usage compared to 2023. In X’s continued bid to change (and remain popular), it has been leaning into resources for creators and its dwindling advertisers. One such shift came in a February announcement that the platform would roll out tools so that “advertisers on X can run ads against a curated list of premium content creators” — including pre-roll video ads, Forbes reported. As for longer videos, we’ll have to wait until they roll out on Samsung and Fire TVs to see how effectively they grab users’ attention.
