- Quibi is launching in a couple of months and it will be a premium streaming video service unlike any other. These are the details.
About 19 months ago, former eBay and HP CEO Meg Whitman and former Dreamworks CEO and Walt Disney Studios chair Jeffrey Katzenberg launched a new company called Quibi. And Quibi took the main stage at CES last month to describe its vision as the world’s first mobile-only premium entertainment platform. Quibi is officially launching on April 6, 2020.
When the service launches, it will have over 175 new original shows and 8,500 episodes of quick bite content. The quick bite content will range from comedies and dramas to dating shows and news. Plus the company will deliver over 3 hours of premium and original content every weekday, 52 weeks a year. This is nearly 35% more than any TV network delivers during the prime time schedule.
With $1.4 billion in funding, Quibi has signed deals with major studios for shows that have episodes of about 10 minutes or shorter. But the production budgets are similar to the ones that are associated with TV networks.
“The relationship between Silicon Valley and Hollywood goes to the roots of both communities. The very first product that Silicon Valley ever produced, the 200B audio oscillator was used by The Walt Disney Company to create the incredible sound of Fantasia in 1940. When Disney purchased eight of those oscillators, they gave birth to Hewlett-Packard, and the Silicon Valley we know today!” said Whitman in a LinkedIn post. “There is a long history in Hollywood of technology enabling new ways to tell stories. If you think about it, the invention of moving picture technology, enabled a whole new way to tell stories that could be brought to life in a movie theater versus a live theatrical production.”
Another executive who instrumental to the success of Quibi is chief product officer Tom Conrad. Conrad is known for overseeing the launch of Pandora and he also headed up Snapchat’s product team during a hyper-growth phase.
Some of Conrad’s former colleagues said that he has the ability to channel what people expect from a product. Pandora founder and former CEO Tim Westergren pointed out that Conrad is one of the “small number of true product visionaries.”
In an interview with Protocol, Pandora’s former vice president of engineering Carl Edwards said that Conrad’s attention to detail has been the key to growing the music service to 80 million monthly active users.
And Westergren acknowledged that Conrad has the rare ability to invent “simple solutions to very complex problems.”
Quibi differentiates from other entertainment platforms through a feature called Turnstyle. With Turnstyle, you can switch between full-screen portrait and landscape as you see fit.
The Turnstyle feature is made possible by the app streaming recordings with both modes in the background so the views can be switched back and forth by rotating the phone or tablet. And most Quibi shows are recorded in 8K to support the different viewing modes.
Most Quibi shows are being recorded in 8K and then edited into the separate landscape and portrait versions for Turnstyle.
The content is being made by some of the biggest names in Hollywood, including Academy Award winners Steven Spielberg, Peter Farrelly, and Guillermo del Toro; directors like Antoine Fuqua, Lena Waithe, Sam Raimi, and Catherine Hardwicke; and stars such as Stephan James, Chrissy Tiegen, Laurence Fishburne, Dave Franco, Bill Murray, Emily Mortimer, and Kevin Hart
“Platforms still seem to be happy that their users kind of wander the virtual Blockbuster video aisles for tens of minutes before they finally settle on a piece of content,” explained Conrad in the interview with Protocol. “For me, that’s not good enough. I want people to come to Quibi and in seconds find a great piece of content. That’s really what we were trying to do at Pandora.”
Plus Quibi is offering advertisers with a new opportunity, which is a brand-safe platform that targets millennials. Some of the advertisers that are working with Quibi at launch include Anheuser Busch, Discover, General Mills, Google, Procter & Gamble, Pepsi, Progressive, Taco Bell, T-Mobile, and Walmart.
In terms of cost, Quibi is going to charge $4.99 per month for a subscription with limited commercials. And an ad-free version will cost $7.99 per month.
Here are some of the trailers that Quibi released for its upcoming programs:
Elba vs Block
Flipped
The Fugitive
Punk’d With Chance The Rapper
