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To the ranks of Netflix (NASDAQ: NFLX), Walt disney (NYSE: DIS), Amazon (NASDAQ: AMZN), and the rest of the streaming service gang, can now add a new name: Quibi. Newer and less known than its peers, Quibi launched on April 6 of this year, on time, despite the COVID-19 crisis.
Quibi is an ambitious service that somehow looks very different from its more established competition. Quibi’s short videos and mobile focus seem to bet on a fast-moving future where streamers would be just as eager to take a few minutes of entertainment on the go as they would be to settle down in front of the TV. But are we already living in that future? And if not, will we ever get there?
Image source: Getty Images.
The concept
Quibi’s main offerings, his “Quibis” of the same name, are short videos. An acronym for “quick bites,” Quibis are generally not just clips or highlights. They still serve as full episodes or shows, albeit in a smaller portion size than viewers have grown accustomed to on Netflix or Hulu. For example, the Quibi website currently features a screenshot of Survive, an original series starring Sophie Turner. The first episode lasts only eight minutes.
The length of the videos is not the only thing that Quibi has. The service is also extremely focused on mobile entertainment. At the time of writing this article, Quibi launched only on mobile devices – users will not find Quibi support on established home entertainment and streaming platforms such as Roku (NASDAQ: ROKU) or the Amazon Fire TV.
Quibi was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former president of Walt Disney Studios who produced hits like The little Mermaid (1989) and The Lion King (1994) before co-founding DreamWorks Animation, where he served as CEO until the acquisition of the company by Comcast. Quibi is privately owned, but has the backing of large public companies and their subsidiaries. The service has accumulated billions of dollars in funds from investors such as Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony (NYSE: SNE) Images, AT&T (NYSE: T)and ViacomCBS (NASDAQ: VIAC). And Quibi’s content has been produced through partnerships with many of those same media giants.
A mixed debut
How is all this going with the public? So far, Quibi’s criticism has been mixed.
Quibi was criticized for The Guardian and USA Nowadays, among other points of sale. It received criticism from The Verge and Vanity Fair, to name just two. As for the positive reviews, they are much more difficult to find in the mainstream press.
Quibi’s target audience seems equally impressed. Users have quickly complained about one aspect of the company’s vision – its mobile-only approach is frustrating. Critics of this approach have turned to social media and app stores to express their frustration.
A more objective measure of the launch’s success would be app downloads, but it’s still unclear how many of them there were. Two analytics companies, Sensor Tower and App Annie, have released two very different Quibi download figures on launch day (300,000 and 700,000, respectively). The lower of those two would be a pretty tough start for Quibi, and either figure would place him outside of the big leagues (for reference, Disney + had over four million installs on launch day).
More encouraging for Quibi is the reception his short-format concept has received. While critics aren’t impressed with the shows themselves, and users seem frustrated by their inability to watch content on a real TV, the concept at the heart of Quibi’s approach: the idea that there’s no reason why shows can’t be eight or 10 minutes long instead of 30 or 50, it seems to be going reasonably well, at least by subjective measures of user reviews and criticism.
And why shouldn’t I? The half-hour and hour spaces (minus 10 minutes or so for commercial breaks) were a consequence of legacy pay-TV formats and scheduled viewing. In a world on demand, only tradition makes viewers expect shows to last around 25-30 or 50-60 minutes. To be fair, tradition can be powerful: Readers have consumed more novels than novels and short stories for generations, and a century or so of film production has produced relatively few films of less than an hour or more than three, but there are There are many reasons to believe that short videos have a bright future.
For one thing, at least one video streaming platform already has many short videos: AlphabetYouTube, which is Quibi’s most obvious competition and one of the most successful streaming services on the planet. And short-form videos aren’t just for busy people, they also allow compulsive watchers to adjust their streaming sessions in increments of just a few minutes. With short episodes, you can watch for a few more minutes without having to quit in the middle of an episode. And of course short videos are perfect for busy people on the go.
Of course, relatively few people are busy these days, which brings us to the curious Quibi weather issue.
Timing is everything
By some measures, this is a good time for a streaming service to launch. After all, we are in the midst of a stay-at-home transmission boom fueled by bored children, adults who work (or pretend to work) at home, unemployed workers, and other people and families who suddenly find themselves with too much time on hands. Netflix, Amazon’s Twitch and YouTube are among the streaming services that enjoy more traffic than ever. And while that has been a problem for broadband infrastructure in Europe, state communications networks have held up quite well. All in all, it should be a good time to launch a new streaming service in the US domestic market. USA
However, Quibi seems uniquely inappropriate for the moment. Quibi’s short videos are designed for busy people, and those lucky enough to avoid the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis may be less busy. Compulsive observation would still be an option, but Quibi’s mobile-only launch suggests focusing on the “quick bites” aspects of the app. The mobile-only approach also makes it difficult to share the viewing experience with others: Families are probably not gathering around an iPhone for family movie night, which is a difficult choice at a time when many are take refuge at home with spouses and children or roommates.
Quibi’s biggest problem, then, seems to be his mobile focus. A mobile-only app makes little sense in a world where so many people are locked up in their homes with their televisions, their families, and little to do. Adding insult to injury is the fact that some content partners, like Disney’s ESPN, are limited by the COVID-19 crisis; ESPN must struggle to produce short-form sports content when sports leagues around the world have closed their stores. On the other hand, Quibi’s association with NBC News should be an advantage in this environment, since Nielsen It has predicted that an increase in television viewing by quarantined viewers should help raise news content in particular.
Return to the future
Evaluating Quibi’s foundational theories is impossible to do in a particularly precise way, because there are too many variables at stake, including, perhaps most importantly, the apparent opinion of critics and users that Quibi’s programs are quite lousy . But the early response suggests an intriguing future for Quibi’s short-form video concept, while casting serious doubt on Quibi’s needlessly mobile limiting approach. The good news for Quibi and its content partners is that the idea of small-size entertainment can have staying power. Assuming Quibi hasn’t signed any deals with its content partners to keep it away from platforms like Roku, an investment in non-mobile apps should patch up the service’s biggest weakness.
On the other hand, Quibi’s competition is not obliged to stand still while Quibi entitles the ship. If short-form content reaches the public, then other streaming services may rush to meet that demand. That wouldn’t be good for Quibi, but it could offer benefits to content partners who have or will soon have their own streaming services like Disney and NBCUniversal, as well as competitors like Netflix. Quibi seems unlikely to change the broadcast market overnight, especially in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. But don’t be surprised if the short form concept has a gradual and lasting effect on the way on-demand services are organized and offer their original programming.
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