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A revolution in streaming video to mobile will take place in April with the launch of Quibi.

Film producer and Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg speaks about Quibi at the 2020 Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. Picture: AFP

A revolution in streaming video to mobile will take place in April with the launch of Quibi, a new media platform devised by former chair of Walt Disney Studios and former DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg designed specifically for phones and aimed at millennials.

Quibi is headed by a prominent figure in the tech industry, Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay and Hewlett Packard. We don’t know if Quibi will succeed although Whitman says it has already sold its first year advertising inventory of $US150m ($219m), so it’s off to a flying start financially. US firms such as PepsiCo, Walmart, Taco Bell, Google and T Mobile all want access to young, cashed-up users.

The revolution is the way video is streamed. First, it’s designed for consuming on the go and for mobile use only. Content has to be told in about 6-10-minute chunks, which might suit you while waiting for the train, in the doctor’s waiting room and having an afternoon break at work. Content includes news, weather, movies and chapters of shows.

You can tell longer stories in Quibi but they have to be sliced and diced into those short takes.

Quibi chief technology officer Rob Post talks about Quibi's ‘Turnstyle’ technology for short-form video streaming for mobile devices at CES in Las Vegas. Picture: AFP

The biggest innovation is how it is presented. Content has to look great in both landscape and portrait orientation on a phone at any moment. This means it’s shot to multiple phones and cameras. Landscape orientation might show the broad detail in a movie scene, but when you flip to portrait, you might see close-ups of characters as they talk. This means it’s a brave new world for video production.

However, Quibi is being embraced by the likes of director/producers Antoine Fuqua, Peter Farrelly and Catherine Hardwicke, appearing in its welcome video along with actress Reese Witherspoon when launched at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas this month.

It also means existing video content shot in one orientation (eg, landscape) isn’t suited to Quibi. All content has to be remade. That doesn’t seem an obstacle for Quibi given the Hollywood talent jumping aboard such as Witherspoon, who will host a wildlife documentary series called “Fierce Queens”, comedian Bill Burr, Jennifer Lopez and Naomi Watts, along with Steven Spielberg and Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro who reportedly are producing horror projects.

Quibi can interact with a phone’s sensors for special effects, for example some horror movies might only be available at night. You could have your phone shake during an earthquake.

We don’t know if Quibi will come to Australia, but it is likely as we live in a global village. Nevertheless it does seem Quibi is the coolest thing in Hollywood since talking movies.

Chris Griffith attended CES in Las Vegas courtesy of Hisense.