Key Takeaways
- X’s hyped smart TV app may struggle to stand out in a saturated market of video streaming platforms like YouTube.
- Despite Elon Musk’s involvement, X faces challenges with buggy videos and lackluster exclusive content hosting.
- X TV may struggle to compete with well-established platforms like YouTube and Nebula due to issues with trust and functionality.
On April 23, the X News account on X (formerly known as Twitter) announced that a new smart TV app called X TV would be launching soon. The promotional video shows a user interface mockup that looks a lot like video streaming sites like YouTube. X CEO Linda Yaccarino then posted more information about X TV, stating that X will be bringing “real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs.” Supposed features will include a trending video algorithm, AI-driven topics for organizing videos, and the ability to move what you’re watching from device to device, like from your phone to your TV. Yaccarino wrote that it’ll be coming soon to more smart TVs, and that it’s still being built.
As much as X is hyping this venture up, and as excited as Elon Musk’s reply guys are about the whole thing, I have pretty big doubts about both X’s ability to launch a successful product like this, and to actually have it stand out in the world of video streaming.
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1 EVs, Twitter, and now TV…Musk may be taking on too much
Since acquiring Twitter, it hasn’t been the same
Julian Christ / Unsplash
Since acquiring Twitter, Elon Musk has fumbled the platform. Major examples include proclaiming that “Comedy is legal now” immediately after taking over Twitter, followed by the mass suspension of parody accounts, and mass proliferation of hate speech on Twitter, causing many companies to pull out from advertising. Another is changing the name of Twitter to X, changing the moniker for one of the most well-known names in social media to something very easily mistaken for a very different type of website.
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One of the biggest failed ventures launched since Musk took over is the overhauling of the verification system to allow anyone to get a blue checkmark by paying $8, leading to issues with impersonation, misinformation, and further boosting of hate speech in the algorithm. X also removed legacy verification from the account of many journalists and public figures, making it harder to recognize which accounts are actually reputable and which aren’t. This move was executed in a chaotic and disorganized way and is widely considered by users to be a horrible decision.
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And while YouTube has had its fair share of problems over the years, it’s never had a branding problem on this scale before. In fact, YouTube has been really consistent with its branding and messaging as a platform. The user interface has changed in subtle ways over the years in ways that modernize it, but it’s never changed its color scheme, and always kept the red rectangle motif that’s been present since the beginning. YouTube is an instantly recognizable brand at this point, and instead of following the same ethos, Elon Musk changed everything about Twitter’s branding when shifting to calling it X.
2 Specifically, X’s exclusive videos have been a flop
Tucker on X tried and failed to prove that X is a viable service for video content
Tucker Carlson Network
One of the first things you see in the promotional video for X TV is a thumbnail for Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin for his exclusive show hosted on X, Tucker on X. This show is the only really widespread and well-known show ever hosted exclusively on X, so it’s no wonder it’s featured so prominently in the video. But since late 2023, we’ve known that Tucker Carlson is launching his own streaming service separately from X, with Carlson stating that X was unable to build the technology needed for him to create content through that platform on time, though he still frequently posts on the social media site.
Meanwhile, YouTube at one point successfully carved out its own category of YouTube Originals, making exclusive movies and series specifically for release on YouTube. While YouTube has abandoned Originals as a program, the content is still available and has amassed millions upon millions of views collectively.
The YouTube Originals channel alone has 6.7 million subscribers, and as an example, the first episode of the docuseries The Age of A.I. hosted by Robert Downey Jr. has 62 million views. So even though this part of the brand has been abandoned, it was still significantly more successful than the idea of exclusive videos hosted on X ever was.
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On top of all of this, videos on X are buggy and difficult to watch because of that. Videos frequently don’t load properly and freeze, showing that the way video is integrated into the site is flawed in ways that don’t even enable a good viewing experience. In my own experience trying to watch the Vladimir Putin interview, I frequently had to reload the page in order to make the video work again, and often when selecting the time I wanted to pick up from, the video would simply stop working. How can we expect engineers at X to build a functional smart TV app if the app and website still can’t even properly host video content, especially given how much smaller X’s team is after mass layoffs?
3 You can’t beat the giants
X can’t compete with established platforms like YouTube or Nebula
Given everything mentioned above, hosting videos on a new service like X TV would be a lot less worth it than just hosting them on a service like YouTube. If you can host videos on both platforms without exclusivity, why bother uploading them to a service that will mostly be watched by a group of Elon Musk fans rather than by a wider audience, since that wider audience is largely alienated by the moves made by X? And when it comes to X-exclusive content, who would want to box themselves into a platform that is run by the same company that can barely even pay creators already with its ad-sharing program? It just doesn’t seem like a smart expansion of the X universe to add on new products like a smart TV app when there are so many logistical issues X is already facing. It’s not feasible to launch an app like this “soon” when it’s still actively being built, and when the audience for such a platform would likely be unsubstantial.
When it comes to launching new services for video hosting, you also need to build out a niche. A great example of this is Nebula, which is an ad-free service driven by paid memberships that allows for more creative freedom than YouTube, and is owned by the content creators who host their videos on the platform. This profit-sharing model makes Nebula stand out in a market driven by ad money and dominated by a few big corporations.
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YouTube has successfully branded itself as a trustworthy platform for creators to make advertising money from, build a substantial following, and build careers off of.
I personally don’t see a world where X TV can make a name for itself as a worthwhile smart TV app — but only time will tell. Too many people have soured on the platform itself and the owner, and building trust with a user base and creators takes time and effort that X doesn’t seem to be interested in building. Meanwhile, YouTube has successfully branded itself as a trustworthy platform for creators to make advertising money from, build a substantial following, and build careers off of.
