You all probably remember the day Tucker Carlson was unceremoniously yanked off the Fox News airwaves in April. He’s been posting interviews and monologues to social media platform X in the months since, but it just wasn’t quite the same as watching him host the highest-rated cable news program in the nation.
The firing came in the wake of a massive $787.5 million settlement Fox made with Dominion Voting Systems after they sued the network for defamation for questioning the integrity of their machines. Various other theories have also been floated about the exact reason for his termination.
But now he’s taking his next step: a new streaming service set to debut Monday. He announced the move on Twitter/X:
Tucker Carlson launches new streaming service pic.twitter.com/gVAjRiDdLC
— ShotGunBonnie (@ShotGun_Bonnie) December 10, 2023
The announcement was short but to the point, and delivered with his usual enthusiasm and humor:
Hey, it’s Tucker Carlson!
We’ve been out of work for seven or eight months now, hard to know. Time flies when you’re unemployed, but actually, we have been working in secret and producing an awful lot of material for months now. Interviews, et cetera, and all of it has now found its way to TuckerCarlson.com.
We’re launching a brand new thing very soon and we’d love for you to see it. So go to TuckerCarlson.com to see it first.
The service will be known as “Tucker Carlson Network” and will host a variety of content, according to insiders:
It will be home to at least five different shows by midweek, they said, including interviews, short-form videos and monologues.
Tucker Carlson Network, whose logo resembles a red pill, will cost $9 a month—or $72 a year—and will initially be solely available through Carlson’s website, they said. Some of the content will be available without a subscription and will be ad-supported, while some interviews and monologues will be available exclusively to subscribers, who will have access to that content without ads.
Although Carlson was enjoying considerable success on Elon Musk’s X, the platform apparently wasn’t enough to fill the popular host’s needs:
Carlson and his team explored launching TCN through X, but the company wasn’t able to move quickly enough to build out the technology they needed to run a subscription service, the people said.
He will still post free content to X, though, the insiders said, and will also be launching a new podcast. He has some serious backers for his new venture:
In recent months, Carlson and Patel lined up financiers, lawyers and media strategists to work on the new company, The Wall Street Journal previously reported. 1789 Capital, an investment firm that aims to capitalize on the opportunities that it sees left open by the “wokeness” of more traditional sources of capital, recently led a $15 million seed round into Carlson and Patel’s company, with other private investors, the Journal reported.
Red Seat Ventures, a company that has helped media personalities including former Fox News hosts Megyn Kelly and Bill O’Reilly launch their own media businesses, is selling much of the advertising for TCN’s podcast, according to the people familiar with the matter.
I for one am excited about this new venture. While his X postings were interesting, and sometimes enjoyed huge viewership, to me they lacked the power of the eight o’clock hour, where his show had become must-see, appointment TV. Although I did not love his Fox show in its earliest incarnation way back in 2016, where he would often have on leftists that were intellectually inferior to him and proceed to slice and dice their vapid arguments — it was just too easy — the show matured over time, and his monologues became the stuff of legend.
I look forward to seeing how this endeavor unfolds.
