If you're active on social media, you either hate or love the takeover of Twitter by notorious billionaire Elon Musk. It didn't take long for the platform to be rebranded as “X” and to have a number of major changes made to the social media platform's DNA.
Besides mixing things up, Elon made clear his desire to grow X beyond what Twitter used to be — the addition of video and voice calls recently shows this off. But now, it looks like an app we thought would be restricted to our smartphones and computers is about to find its way to smart televisions. That was not on my 2024 tech bingo card.
Elon Musk's X Is Coming To Smart TVs, And Bringing Long-Form Videos
This is random, considering that X (formerly known as Twitter) has always been considered a social media application, but it looks like the platform is expected to make its way to smart televisions running on Samsung and Amazon operating systems.
The interesting part is that it does not seem to come with the social aspect as the major focus (if it'll even be present). Instead, the app looks set to serve similarly to a video hosting service like YouTube, using the long-form videos hosted on the platform and making them accessible through the TV app.
According to Fortune, this app is expected to launch next week. That'd be a lot sooner than we'd normally expect considering this is the first we're hearing about it, that'd be interesting, but it doesn't look like there's much to doubt, as Elon himself said to expect the app to launch “soon”.
If Elon Gets His Way, X Will Replace A Lot More Than Just YouTube
Elon Musk is ambitious and most people can agree about that regardless of their personal opinions on the man. While it seems like trying to tackle YouTube is a gargantuan task to take on, that's only a small part of the plans that he has in the chamber for X.
It's no secret that the master plan for X is for it to become an “everything app”, or a “super app”. It started off as a social media application, but if you use the app very actively, you must have noticed more of a focus on recommending video content (like TikTok), providing a deeper chat experience with video and voice calls (like Messenger or WhatsApp), and with “Grok”, you essentially get a ChatGPT-like assistant built into the app.
But that's just the start of things, and Musk did not buy Twitter for $44 billion for nothing. His vision includes integrating payments and wallets, recruiting (think LinkedIn), dating, and livestreaming. If executed well, it'd help free your phone of some other apps, but I fear that it won't be done well. And even if it is, expect to have to pay for Twitter Blue to have access to most of those perks.
However, the hope is that we won't need to wait for too long before we see what the billionaire can do with X, and if we're lucky, we'll see his vision at the end of the day.
