X just announced a Smart TV app for streaming videos. Or more accurately, it claims it is building one, without mentioning a launch date. The aptly named X TV aims to be “your companion for a high-quality, immersive entertainment experience on a bigger screen.” By quality entertainment, X probably means a video of Tucker Carlson being really impressed by the shopping carts in Russia. That’s no joke. Carlson is prominently featured in the small teaser video.
X CEO and Marketing robot Linda Yaccarino promises “real-time” content and wide availability, but otherwise details are sparse. Of course, there is some talk in business about AI and boasts about its “effortless transfer” from a mobile device to a TV. Wait, that’s what I thought Was a TV app? So it’s also a mobile app that broadcasts to a TV? Is there another word for less than half baked? Does Raw work?
In other words, we don’t know much. That’s X. All we get are word salads that don’t actually mean anything, and then one day the app may or may not actually appear. If that’s the case, it’s probably hopelessly broken. This sounds harsh, but there is plenty of tried and tested pudding out there. We got receipts.
When Twitter first rebranded to X, the company promised that the whole thing would soon be “powered by AI.” X finally created a chatbot, Grok, but it’s not exactly the smartest algo in the shed. It also doesn’t look like it will be “powering” the site any time soon. Elon Musk promised that X would soon become a payments and banking platform, which fortunately did not materialize. Remember when Musk said all major X decisions would be like this conducted via a user survey? When was the last time you saw something like that? There’s also the whole blue check fiasco.
The long-promised job search tool has been launched, but it just sucks. While X pursued original video content for a while, things seem to have cooled off since the Don Lemon/Elon Musk debacle. Two years after Musk bought the site, it’s still far from being the “everything app.”
There is also the question of what type of content is streamed on this platform. Again, that’s My city is ruining American society. The ad, as noted above, puts Carlson in the spotlight, which points to an endless stream of videos of people complaining about the word “woke” without actually defining it. Call me crazy, but I prefer watching real TV.
Devil. Even if I wanted to watch a vlog full of impotent rage, YouTube is the place for me. It is now available on Smart TVs and works perfectly. It has everything Yaccarino promises will one day appear on X TV. You can also learn a lot on YouTube, not just how to block people with a blue checkmark next to their name.
X TV may or may not be released on some or all Smart TVs in the near or distant future. This could be an actual app on the TV or an app on a phone that broadcasts to a TV. It may or may not be powered by AI. It may have “tailored search” or it may simply show you endless loops of Jordan Peterson bursting into tears. Who the hell knows? Keep an eye out for this latest twist on the video…or not.