Movies, news in quick bites coming to phone near you
As the coronavirus lockdown threatens the future of traditional film distribution and has streaming services rubbing their hands at the prospect of millions of people forced to stay indoors with nothing to do but watch their offerings, Quibi, a new service designed for mobile phones, is looking to change the future of video streaming when it launches on April 6.
The brainchild of former Disney and DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and former
Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman, the company has for the past two years been raising $1bn in start-up capital and enlisting the services of heavyweight Hollywood A-listers for the production of its content — episodes of less than 10 minutes that can be watched in portrait and landscape mode on mobile phones.
As Katzenberg and Whitman see it, their competition is not the streaming giants such as Netflix, Disney Plus or Amazon Prime but rather free video services such as YouTube and Instagram, which while they allow for the creation of user-generated content, don’t, as Katzenberg said, “know how to do what we do, with all due respect”.
Quibi has made deals with some of Hollywood’s biggest names and has announced a roster of 50 shows produced by creators such as Steven Spielberg, Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Teigen and Idris Elba.. These cover everything in their short episode series from feature style dramas to reality TV and game show concepts.
When the service launches it will cost subscribers $5 a month with ads and $8 a month for an ad-free version. The video technology that the service — named after the compression of the words “quick bites ”— uses means that whether you’re holding your phone upright or horizontal, as you turn your screen the image seamlessly switches from portrait to landscape mode without interrupting your viewing.
Quibi’s content will be divided into three categories: “lighthouse productions”, which are feature films broken into 10minute segments; “quick bites”, which offer stand-alone stories; and “daily essentials”, which are news focused and provide daily curated information in bitesized chunks.
Quibi plans to roll out three hours of new content a day, 175 original shows and 8,500 hours of quick-bite content over the course of its first year of operation. At average per minute costs ranging from $125,000 for original shows to $50,000 for quick-bite content and $10,000 for daily essential shows, it’s expensive stuff to produce, but Katzenberg believes this will elevate the service’s content way above its competitors and prove attractive to subscribers.
Whether Katzenberg and Whitman’s high-level roster of partners and sizeable investment from backers will pay off remains to be seen but in
THE QUIBI SERVICE IS DESIGNED FOR MOBILE PHONES AND IS NAMED AFTER THE COMPRESSION OF THE WORDS ‘QUICK BITES’
a fast-moving world with shorter attention spans it may just turn out that next year’s Oxford English Dictionary word of the year will be a new verb,
Quibi — that thing you do on your phone to get a short burst of entertainment, inspiration or information when you have 10 minutes to spare.