(Credit: Nathan Stirk/Contributor/Getty Images News via Getty Images)
Elon Musk's X will soon launch a video-viewing app for smart TVs, dubbed X TV, CEO Linda Yaccarino confirmed today, exactly one month after app researcher and known leaker Nima Owji shared details on what the X TV app could look like.
"Soon we'll bring real-time, engaging content to your smart TVs with the X TV App," Yaccarino writes. "This will be your go-to companion for a high-quality, immersive entertainment experience on a larger screen."
X TV will offer its own dedicated video search, video feed, and AI-curated video content. It will also be able to track what users watch on their smartphones' X app and continue watching that video content on X TV.
The post includes a brief clip showing what appears to be the X TV app in development, highlighting a recent controversial interview Tucker Carlson did with Russian President Vladimir Putin and footage of a SpaceX rocket launch. X's official "News" account published the same clip with the caption: "Coming soon to a television near you."
Is this X's answer to YouTube, where users upload over 500 hours of content every minute and viewers watch billions of hours of videos daily? Possibly. Since his Twitter takeover, Musk has publicly pushed for the historically text-based platform to become video-centric, allowing paying users to upload longer, higher-resolution videos.
Users who aren't paying for Twitter can currently only upload videos 140 seconds in length, but paying Premium users can upload 1080p videos up to two hours long or a 720p video up to three hours long via a computer's web browser or X's iOS app. Yes, this is the length of an entire movie. One X account previously uploaded the entire Dune: Part Two film to the platform before it was eventually taken down.
Despite X's big TV push, it's unclear whether its infrastructure is ready to handle a deluge of video content. On a computer's web browser, X's video uploading tool still labels 1080p resolution as "rarely needed," presumably in an effort to push users toward selecting the lower 720p resolution instead. YouTube, by comparison, offers 4K and even 8K video uploads.
Considering how many modern-day smart TVs offer 4K or even 6K resolution, users might find that videos on the X TV app won't look as good as they could—until the social media platform adds the ability for 4K uploads and upscaling for older content.