X doubles down on video with a new TV app

Years ago, Twitter tried but eventually walked away from building TV apps after getting a lukewarm reception. Now, as it looks to revive its advertising business, its new incarnation X is hoping for a rerun. The company announced a new TV app available “on several app stores” as part of a wider effort to court more advertisers, creators, and partners around a “video-first platform.”

That pivot into video will also include a new video tab on X itself, it added. The tab has yet to launch.

Users are noting that a beta of the TV app is already appearing on Amazon Fire TV and Google TV; we’ve been able to confirm we can see the Amazon Fire TV app ourselves. No sign of the app yet on Apple TV, Roku or other TV platforms.

Twitter’s CEO Linda Yaccarino announced plans for the TV apps initially in April of this year.

The new plans to drum up more advertising comes at a crunch time for X on the revenue front, with the company and its advertising business drowning underwater.

With revenue plunging at the company over concerns of growing toxicity and falling user numbers, at least one major backer, Fidelity, marked down the valuation of its investment by as much as 71.5% at the end of 2023, implying a valuation of $12.5 billion for X, versus the $44 billion Elon Musk paid to buy it and take it private.

Meanwhile, to fight back, X in August filed an antitrust suit against an advertising association, claiming its members were unfairly boycotting and not advertising on the platform. (The advertiser group was disbanded days after the suit, although it appears X is still suing.)

Whether all of that can be offset by spinning up a new video business remains to be seen.

From the screenshot, it seems like the TV app will surface videos from different organizations, publishers, and creators on the app. There is also a chance that these creators have published these videos on their own apps or even YouTube, which has a much bigger audience of people consuming content on TV screens.

This is not the first time that the social platform has dabbled in TV apps to drum up new activity. Back in 2016, when it was still Twitter, the company launched a slew of TV apps to “…watch live events and see what people are talking about, keeping them connected to what’s happening.” It shuttered most of these apps just two years later as it looked to cut some of its less profitable enterprises. It was not clear how many users the apps had at the time.

Yet doing more in video continued to remain a potentially lucrative, if elusive, goal for the company. Just before Musk took over the platform, Twitter added a TikTok-like full-screen feed. You can still tap on a video to switch to the full-screen mode and scroll down to keep watching new clips.

While a vertical feed or a TV app is not exactly a new move, X’s challenge will be to nudge creators to post original video content — and ultimately for those creators and that content to be compelling enough to drive more usage of its apps.

Putting the cart before the horse has proven to be tough. X started an ad revenue share program last year, but it is based on engagement and views (as so many of these creator incentive programs are). When YouTube creator MrBeast posted a video and earned $263,000 from ad revenues, he called the payout “a bit of a facade” because advertisers bought ads on his videos, and the figure might be an outlier.

In March, The Wall Street Journal reported that even after Musk met with creators, some of them were unclear about the platform’s long-term plan to support the creator economy.

Musk has tried different experiences with videos, such as allowing video streaming on Spaces, enabling video calls to other users, and even testing out a video conferencing tool. However, the company has yet to make any of these tools into sizable monetization opportunities.