Las Vegas Review-Journal (Sunday)
Christopher Lawrence looks at some of the CES innovations coming soon to a screen near you.
IF you weren’t able to keep up with the thousands of products unveiled last week at CES, don’t despair. Like contestants on “The Voice,” most of them will never make any sort of impact on the real world, and you’ll never hear about them again.
Some of those innovations, though, could shape how you consume television, movies and content that falls somewhere in between.
What’s a Quibi?
Over the past year, the streaming startup Quibi has signed up so much talent — Steven Spielberg, Bill Murray, Kevin Hart, Idris Elba, Andy Samberg, Andy Cohen and Chrissy Teigen, among the bigger names — it’s led consumers who are still getting used to the idea of Disney Plus and Apple TV Plus to ask, “What the heck’s a Quibi?”
The subscription service — so focused on short content that its name is an abbreviation of “quick bites,” even though it’s the same number of syllables — offered its first in-depth look Wednesday at the Park Theater.
Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney chairman and DreamWorks co-founder, and CEO Meg Whitman, the former HewlettPackard president and California gubernatorial candidate, took to the stage to preview the service. Set to launch April 6, Quibi’s content, presented in chapters of four to 10 minutes in length, is designed to be consumed by mobile users on the go.
The “Turnstyle” technology, demonstrated Wednesday, will let viewers switch their phones from portrait to landscape mode and back without missing
anything. Some content will even change perspective, from a traditional cinematic experience in landscape mode to a view of a character’s phone when the user rotates to portrait mode.
Some content will play into the technological capabilities of phones. Spielberg wanted to create a scary story that could be watched only at night. Since a phone always knows what time it is, episodes of his “After Dark” will be unlocked after sundown, then disappear before sunrise.
During the presentation, Katzenberg previewed some of the 175 shows and 8,500 episodes promised during the Quibi’s first year. Monthly subscriptions — $4.99 with ads, $7.99 without — will come with more than three hours of new content each day, Whitman said.
Among the content deals Quibi already has made are a new take on “The Fugitive,” a revival of “Reno 911!” and an update of “Varsity Blues” — aka that 1999 Texas high school football movie that birthed the James Van Der Beek “I don’t want your life” meme.
Quibi has new versions of “Punk’d,” “Singled Out” and “Legends of the Hidden Temple,” as well as content partnerships with BBC News, NBC, ESPN, “60 Minutes” and the Weather Channel.
To illustrate Quibi’s focus on millennials, there are comedies about Nikki Fre$h, Nicole Richie’s hip-hop alter ego, and Kirby Jenner, Kendall Jenner’s fake twin.
That show that darn-near killed Zac Efron last month in Papua New
Guinea? It’s for Quibi, and it’s called — wait for it — “Killing Zac Efron.”
There’s even a buddy comedy starring Anna Kendrick about a woman and her boyfriend’s sex doll — Kendrick plays the woman.
More immersive moviegoing
Think of it as the Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup of the high-end moviegoing experience.
South Korea’s CJ 4DPLEX got a little of its 4DX technology, the one used in the motion theater at Regal Cinemas at Red Rock Resort, in its ScreenX, which adds screens to an auditorium’s side walls and has been used at AMC Theaters at Town Square.
The result, 4DX Screen, made its American debut at CES with a twist — a fourth screen on the ceiling.
The combination is dizzyingly immersive, with movie footage taking up most of a customer’s field of vision as the seats pitch, roll, heave and sway in ways far more advanced than the current setup at Red Rock.
The 4DX Screen concept has been rolled out overseas but is still a year or two away from launching in the U.S., according to Duncan MacDonald, head of marketing at CJ 4DPLEX Americas. The company plans to continue introducing 4DX and ScreenX technology separately in U.S. theaters to build brand awareness before combining them here.
MacDonald wasn’t able to say whether the Red Rock location was in line for an upgrade, either with the addition of a ScreenX auditorium or a combined 4DX Screen experience, but the company is in the process of expanding its American presence.
That additional screen on the ceiling is still in the concept stage, MacDonald added, but it could be in theaters in the next two years.
TV makers think big
Televisions are always a major draw at CES, but the home entertainment options that generated the most buzz this year won’t be entertaining in the average home anytime soon. The gaudy models generating the most headlines are limited by their size and expected cost.
Samsung showed off The Wall, a scalable screen that can handle 8K footage at up to an astounding 292 inches. For those of you who are math challenged, that’s more than 24 feet.
LG and Skyworth were among the companies showing off “wallpaper TVs,” with screens so thin they don’t protrude from the wall.
For sheer bonkers, wow-butwhy bravura, though, Samsung demonstrated its Sero, a 47-inch 4K television, while Skyworth countered with its less-heralded 88-inch 8K screen. Both TVs can rotate from horizontal to vertical and back, depending on the user’s content of choice.
Since Quibi isn’t being offered anywhere but phones, mirroring yours to one of these bad boys may be your best chance at watching it on a reasonably sized screen.