Substack says it's coming for your TV. Will anyone notice?
Once pitched as a refuge from the attention economy, the newsletter platform is making a familiar pivot. But users barely blinked
Shedrick Pelt for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Substack, the platform that once promised writers a way out of the attention economy, is now making a familiar bid for a greater slice of that economy.
With Thursday’s announcement of its Substack TV app, the newsletter company is embracing video, and joining a long line of media institutions, from newspapers to cable networks, that have spent the last 15 years wrestling with an internet where both still and moving images routinely — and vastly — outperform text.
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“Substack is the home for the best longform — work creators put real care into and subscribers choose to spend time with,” the company said. “Now these thought-provoking videos and livestreams have a natural home on the TV, where subscribers can settle in for the extended viewing that great video deserves.”
The repeated stress on length, care, thought, choosing to spend one's time, and extended viewing are all noticeable — likely an attempt to establish brand continuity as well as a differentiated, big-screen value proposition akin to the Great Courses TV app. At the same time, that language is unlikely to appease the refugees from video who joined Substack in its earlier, text-heavy incarnations.
Neither is the announcement's focus on celebrity presence on Substack — Dolly Parton, Chris Cilizza, and Jim Acosta.
In practice, however, Substack’s move onto TV screens just formalizes something that’s been happening anyway. Over the past two years, Substack has steadily pushed into video — first with livestreams, then with more polished interview shows, readings, and daily news programs hosted by former cable fixtures. The TV app doesn’t create a new product, but it does give that programming a place on the largest screens in homes.
Moving onto TV likewise brings new expectations around production value, the amount of content, and audience scale, all of which tend to favor creators with existing audiences and resources. Can a unified network brand be far behind?
One thing is sure. The pivots will continue. In the media and platform business, that’s the business. Pivot to text. Pivot to video. Pivot back to text. Pivot back to video. Pivot to celebrity. Pivot to quality. Pivot to — whatever the next pivot may be.
In the meantime, Substack users on the dedicated Reddit $RDDT message boards seemed barely to register the announcement. Instead, the usual stream of posts dedicated to questions about how to find subscribers—and complaints that there are more writers than readers using Substack — just continued unabated.