The social network X, is headed to your TV, with owner Elon Musk confirming the news on the platform this afternoon. Fortune also has an exclusive article with details about the launch of the streaming video app.
The TV app is said to look and feel very familiar (read: a YouTube clone) and will be available on some Smart TVs as soon as next week, according to Fortune’s unnamed source. If it is indeed a ‘identical’ copy, that’s a little disappointing, as any new streaming service should bring some innovation with it.
With Artificial Intelligence being such a hot category in the technology industry right now, along with the fact that X Premium subscribers have access to Grok, a large language model, I would have expected some AI magic when it comes to identifying trending and hot topics on the platform.
A video streaming app is ultimately only as good as its recommendation engine and with X open-sourcing their search and ranking algorithm, it’ll be interesting to see if we get more insight into the TV app via the GitHub repository.
I would also like to see X integrate social feedback into video streaming. This could be in the form of a live chat overlay during a live broadcast, or comments relating to a piece of on-demand content.
X recently launched Spaces with video, a feature that was historically for audio only, if we don’t look too far into the history books and find Periscope. There is an awful lot of video content going out to X, including full episodes from the likes of MKBHD, MrBeast and Tucker Carlson to name a few.
Video on X is something that represents a big opportunity area for increased engagement on the platform. Right now, many users don’t know that after watching a video, you can swipe up to watch another, but the service lacks a dedicated video icon to enter a TikTok-style video stream. The UI recently got a tweak to suggest you can swipe up, and will even suggest this a few seconds before a video ends, but when you do, it feels like the next piece of content is completely random.
For content creators, video uploads are still restricted to 1080p content and given many of us have 4K TVs, X will be relying on some pretty good upscaling technology to help make the content appear better than the pixel count suggests. X will need to offer 4K uploads soon, if they’re serious about competing with YouTube.
Let us know if you’ll be installing the X app on your TV and grabbing the popcorn to settle in for a good night in.
With a TV app now confirmed, it does beg the question, when are we likely to see an X app in Tesla vehicles, particularly one that allows X spaces (audio only) to be streamed on your morning commute or weekend road trips.
