Hollywood has tried and failed before to get in on the market for short-form digital entertainment. Quibi is the most ambitious attempt yet.
Back on February 2, during the Kansas City Chiefs' come-from-behind victory over the San Francisco 49ers in Super Bowl LIV, a TV commercial featured a bank robbery gone wrong because the getaway driver was obsessing over a Quibi video on his smartphone. You could almost hear viewers in living rooms and sports bars across the country asking in unison:"What the heck is Quibi?"
Quibi is a $4.99 per month video platform, launching April 6, that will serve up dozens of shows featuring Hollywood stars—and Hollywood production values—that are 4–10 minutes in length. The name is an abbreviation of"quick bites." The project is the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the entertainment mogul best known for co-founding the DreamWorks SKG movie studio with Steven Spielberg and David Geffen. Quibi's chief executive is former eBay CEO Meg Whitman.
During a presentation at the Consumer Electronics Show in January, Katzenberg played up Quibi as a"revolution in entertainment." Katzenberg told CES attendees that consumers ages 18–44 now watch 80 minutes of content"on the go" each day, up from six minutes per day in 2012."We started to wonder, what if we could tell movie-caliber stories with the power of this new technology," he added.
Quibi's long-scheduled launch next month will happen during a coronavirus national emergency that right now has the major studios shutting down productions en masse; even newly launched Apple TV+ has suspended all of its active series and legions of fans of Netflix's Stranger Things will likely have to wait a bit longer than planned to binge-watch the fourth season.
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