Elon Musk has thrown a lot of things against the wall and hoped they stick (read: produce money) ever since he bought Twitter (now X) in October 2022. Now, he’s adopting a YouTube strategy by introducing a video streaming service over the network, according to SamMobile. With a quote tweet from DogeDesigner’s account, Musk declared the feature to be “Coming soon”: “You can soon watch your favorite X long form videos directly on your SmartTVs.”
X is going to launch a special software that lets viewers watch these videos on Fire TV from Amazon and Samsung TVs. This feature demonstrates that Musk’s recent declaration that X will be a “video-first” platform going forward will extend beyond the little content boxes that are usually visible on feeds to a larger screen. At the same time, Musk asserts that when someone visits X, they view videos eight times out of ten.
Coming soon https://t.co/JlnlSL7eS9
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 9, 2024
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.
