• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, March 10, 2024

Elon Musk wants to start a streaming business on X to compete with services such as YouTube, and plans to launch a television app for Amazon and Samsung smart TVs as soon as this week.

It is part of Musk's dream to build a “everything app.” This service will allow users to watch long-view videos on a bigger screen. In a post on X’s business blog published in February, the company reiterated that “X is not just another app – it's becoming the everything app, seamlessly uniting experiences into one interface, for everyone.”

First-party personalized data would attract advertisers, and more data means enhanced personalized ad targeting across screens. The service would enable Musk to integrate advertising options for brands that tie search and other data and reads from the X social-media platform to watch times and content viewed in the television app.

A source told Fortune that the app looks “identical” to the YouTube TV app. The live-streaming platform Twitch, the encrypted messaging app Signal, and social-media forum Reddit are among some of the other services cited by the source that Musk wants to compete with.

Content on Google TV comes from third-party apps for television.

X’s plan to extend its screen reach from the smartphone to the television is not new. Twitter launched TV apps on at least three other occasions,  Fortune says.

The first version dates back to 2010 on the now defunct Google TV platform. On 2011 an app launched on Samsung's Smart Hub platform for its SmartTVs. Following a $10 million deal to stream 10 NFL games, Twitter in 2016 launched a video streaming app for Amazon Fire TV, Apple TV, and Xbox One.

Some of the hints as to its content can be found in recent deals with the former CNN anchor Don Lemon for a new show to appear exclusively on X, and former Fox news anchor Tucker Carlson, who will publish long-form video content on X.

Content creators on X have been asked to migrate all video content to the platform with an incentive of benefiting from enhanced ad revenue streams. In January, an article was published in Fortune about how Mr. Beast -- one of YouTube’s biggest video stars with about 243 million subscribers at the time of the test -- uploaded a full-length video to test and then publicly disclose his earnings.

Mr. Beast saw his first X video generate more than $250,000 in revenue, but called it "a bit of a facade" because he believed advertisers capitalized on its widespread attention, purchasing ads on his video and thus pumping up his earnings.