Donald Trump’s media company takes a step towards streaming

When Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG) was founded in 2021, plans had already been announced for both a social network (Truth Social) and a streaming service. So it is not a surprise, but on Tuesday Donald Trump’s company announced that the launch is now really underway. Although no dates or names of creators have been mentioned yet.

The underlying technology has been tested over the past six months, the company says. Initially, video will be available to stream in the Truth Social app. Later there would be a separate app and in a third phase the video would also be available on TV.

In a press release, TMTG CEO Devin Nunes said the company wants to provide a home for “high-quality news and entertainment that is being discriminated against by other channels.” “There is a lot of great content that is simply not finding an audience for unfair reasons and we want those creators to know they will soon have a platform where they certainly won’t be canceled,” Nunes said.

The plans sound very similar to those of X can rely on a much larger user base than Truth Social. Musk was already able to bring in former Fox News goldcrest Tucker Carlson.

TMTG apparently wants to go broad with “news networks, religious channels, family-friendly content including films and documentaries, and other content that has been canceled, at risk of being canceled or suppressed by other platforms and services.”

New shares

Truth Social is by no means a resounding success, but TMTG’s share price initially shot up steeply at the start of the stock exchange listing last month.

A share of TMTG even briefly traded at $66, but has since fallen by more than half. The company’s unsatisfactory figures that became known contributed to that decline: in 2023, a loss of 58 million dollars was recorded on a turnover of barely 4.4 million.

On Monday, the company announced that it will float new shares on the stock exchange to raise fresh money. That would dilute the value of the current shares, which pushed the price another 18 percent lower on Monday. The announcement about the imminent start with video on Tuesday did little to remedy this.

Donald Trump owns almost 60 percent of TMTG. He cannot sell those shares until September unless he receives permission from the board of directors. At its peak, his stake in the company was worth $5 billion on paper.