It's Quibi. You invented Quibi.
Even if you're a Tucker Carlson fan, why would you watch his show on Twitter?
You can't keep a conspiracy-addled propagandist down for long, I guess:
Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson plans to launch a new show on Twitter, the pundit announced on Tuesday.
Carlson, in a three-minute video posted to his account with more than 6 million followers, made no mention of Fox News but blasted the news media more generally for what he described as groupthink.
[…]
Carlson gave no further details on his new project, including length, subject matter or frequency.
“Starting soon. we’ll be doing a new version of the show that we’ve been doing for the last 6 1/2 years to Twitter,” Carlson said. “We’ll bring you some other things, too, which we’ll tell you about. But for now, we’re just grateful to be here.”
Longtime readers know my feelings about Carlson,1 but I don't want to talk about him so much as I want to talk about the format.
Video on Twitter is nothing new, of course. But a daily news program on Twitter? I'm getting skyscraper-that-turns-into-a-robot-toy vibes here.
Carlson’s Fox show was an hour long, including MyPillow commercials. The new version will likely be shorter.
But if it’s more than, say, five minutes per episode, I don’t see how it works on Twitter. This is an app you casually browse on your phone while waiting in line or while you should be paying attention to your family, not to settle down and watch television.
Many videos go viral on Twitter, of course, but they’re rarely more than a couple of minutes long and are usually edited down to the money shots, or even an animated GIF.
Long-form videos? Sadly, no one has yet come up with an online format for that.
Well, except for the one on which I found the clip from Big embedded above. You might have heard of it, and even some of its more ideologically minded competitors. (I actually had Carlson putting his new show on Rumble.)
There are people who watch longer YouTube videos on their phones. They’re called teenagers, and they’re watching Mr. Beast get buried alive instead of Tucker Carlson railing against immigrants. The regular cable-news demographic? They still have cable, and might have figured out how to use the YouTube app on their Roku television sets.
Elon might be planning a smart-TV app for Twitter, in which case this could make a little more sense. But this has the stench of Quibi all over it.
Of course, my track record of predictions for technology is no better than my track record of predictions for anything else.
I remember when the iPad was introduced, and I thought it was the stupidest idea I’d ever heard. And when tablets did take off, I thought the BlackBerry Playbook actually showed real promise.
Come to think of it, you know who else thought tablets were a dumb idea? The makers of Big.
I actually don’t think he’s wrong about mainstream media outlets succumbing to groupthink. But there’s a fine line between being an independent, against-the-grain thinker and being chronically paranoid, and far too many commentators - some of whom once counted me as a fan - crossed that line a long time ago. Including the owner of Twitter.