Just the angle: Quibi is coming to change the way you stream
Changing views will be easy with a new entertainment service backed by a power duo from Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Your news, movies and television shows are about to be sliced and diced into no more than 10-minute segments on a phone — like a rump steak chopped into mince so you can eat it with a spoon.
It’s part of the mantra of Quibi, an entertainment streaming service scheduled to launch in April.
Quibi is already backed by millions of dollars in advertising, has many of the movie houses in Hollywood aboard, along with backing from big celebrity names, and reportedly is planning to produce $US1bn ($1.47bn) in content in up to 7000 episodes.
Everything about Quibi suggests it will make an impact. But even the mighty can fall after making an impact. Ask the Titanic.
Quibi is not the brainchild of rank amateurs. Its founder is film producer Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and former DreamWorks chief executive. His CV includes producing Disney classics such as The Little Mermaid, Aladdin and The Lion King.
Quibi’s chief is Meg Whitman, former president and chief executive of eBay and Hewlett-Packard. She was strategic planning vice-president at the Walt Disney Company in the late 1980s and has been on the board of DreamWorks. In 2010, Forbes listed her net worth as $US1.3bn.
On one level, Katzenberg and Whitman are the odd couple. Katzenberg is a high-profile Democrat who raised millions for former US president Barack Obama’s election campaigns. Whitman is a high-profile Republican who ran unsuccessfully for California governor in 2010, reportedly spending $US119m on her campaign in a Democratic stronghold.
Thankfully the power of business acumen and the creative spirit appears to have won out over the US political chasm. Whitman says the duo brings together the different strengths of Hollywood and Silicon Valley.
Investors and advertisers take Quibi seriously with this pair in charge. According to The Hollywood Reporter, Quibi already has raised $US1bn from major Hollywood studios and other investors, and plans to raise another $US500m.
At the Quibi launch in Las Vegas this month, Whitman said the company had already sold its first-year advertising inventory of $US150m, with the big US names jumping aboard including Pepsico, Walmart, Taco Bell, Google and T-Mobile. The ad load is 2.5 minutes per hour.
Quibi is positioning itself as a very different streaming service. First there is that mandatory short duration. These entertainment “quick bites”, six to 10 minutes long, are suited to viewing during short breaks. You could be waiting for a train or bus, having a coffee between meetings, or at the airport waiting to board a flight. A 10-minute news bulletin or the latest episode of your favourite drama might work nicely.
Speaking at the launch, Katzenberg cited The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown, which he says is 464 pages long, with 105 chapters. Each chapter is less than five pages. “No author wants readers to stop in the middle of a chapter … if you only have five minutes, you could read a whole chapter.”
He says television writers have adapted to writing slices of TV dramas to fit logically between commercial breaks.
“It was by bringing together the grand storytelling that we have come to love in a two-hour movie, with the writing technique of television, that we created Quibi,” he says.
Length is not the only criteria for defining Quibi “quick bites”. Content is designed to play exclusively on mobile phones and tablets and primarily targets millennials and generation Z consumers.
Whitman says the phone opens up new opportunities for storytelling. Movie producers can make use of the touch screen, camera, GPS or gyroscope to tell a story. A horror story might play only late at night or when the lights are out. Whitman says Steven Spielberg is thinking of making a scary show that can be watched only after dark. A filmmaker may get your phone to shake during an earthquake scene.
Quibi could not avoid addressing the one big issue when streaming to phones: whether to optimise the content for landscape (wide) or portrait orientation (long).
Quibi’s answer is for all content to be shot in both orientations, in a meaningful way. Viewers can rotate between the two orientations at will. Quibi calls this technology “turnstyle”, where portrait and landscape versions are stitched and coded and packaged as one. A landscape shot might show a wide-angle scene of two people in conversation. Rotate to portrait, and the scene changes to a close-up of the face of the person talking. A landscape scene might show a person texting their friend; the simultaneous portrait shot might display their conversation on the phone.
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Video will stream over Wi-Fi and 3G, and Quibi will work offline. All content will be downloadable under plans for offline viewing and you can scrub videos to the point you want to watch them. Quibi says Google is using its experience with YouTube to help with the delivery of content, including fast and lower latency content delivery.
Quibi is leveraging artificial intelligence. Machine learning will examine what viewers watch and will recommend content at particular times of day. In the end, the quality of content and available on-screen talent may make or break Quibi as it does other services.
Talent doesn’t seem to be a problem. Reese Witherspoon will host a natural science documentary about nature’s females called Fierce Queens.
Jennifer Lopez will host a how called Thanks a Million where she and nine others give an influential person from their early life $US100,000 each, according to The Hollywood Reporter. They will pass on half their money to someone similar.
Australia’s Naomi Watts is to star in the thriller Wolves and Villagers.
Chance the Rapper has tweeted that he will host a revived version of Punk’d, which involves playing pranks on celebrities.
Spielberg and Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro will produce horror, while Spider-man series director Sam Raimi reportedly has signed on to produce 50 States of Fright with Rachel Brosnahan. There’ll be a good serving of horror and sci-fi, which should suit the millennials and zedders.
Quibi will launch in the US on April 6 and will cost $US5 a month with ads, and $US8 a month without them.
Australian availability has yet to be confirmed. However, there is nothing to stop Quibi from making its material available internationally. It avoids messy international copyright disputes by creating its own content.