It was a few minutes after 7 p.m. on Tuesday when Trump TV conked out.

“We have to pause,” said Avi Berkowitz, the 27-year-old director, as he stared at a black square on his laptop where, moments earlier, Episode 2 of “Trump Tower Live” — the Facebook-only talk show produced by the Donald J. Trump campaign — had been streaming.

The panelists on the show, standing a few feet away in a makeshift studio inside a bland Trump Tower office, glanced around, confused. A makeup artist hired for the occasion fiddled with her phone. Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York City and the night’s special guest, kept criticizing Hillary Clinton, until somebody noted that the camera had shut off.

Prime-time news, this was not. The set consisted of two wooden tables pressed together, facing a single camcorder on a tripod. The director, who eventually got the feed working again, was a recent Harvard Law School graduate with no broadcasting background.

Yet “Trump Tower Live” has been seized on as a harbinger of a potential Trump media empire to come.

The show, set to air through Election Day, debuted this week with a CNN-style crawl — filled exclusively with headlines favorable to Mr. Trump — and onscreen graphics borrowed from the cable news playbook. Essentially agitprop presented as news, the program is fueling speculation that Mr. Trump wants to start a network, purveying news and opinion tailored to the candidate’s worldview.