Quibi: Not Quick Enough?

In last week’s post where I gave a brief overview of each of the major streaming services I left out the most recent entrant to the market: Quibi. While it is out to compete for a share of our streaming budgets, Quibi is trying to be different from the other streaming warriors.

Quibi is short for “quick bites” and is optimized for mobile. Each show is divided into chapters of 10 minutes or less and can be viewed in either portrait or landscape. Also you can’t watch it on any device other than your phone; there are no TV apps, AirPlay or Chromecast support, web apps, or iPad app. The sales pitch is that you’ll watch a chapters of your favorite Quibi shows while you are out and about, for example when you’re waiting in line for coffee.

Obviously launching a mobile-only streaming service when the world is required to stay home is unfortunate, but I see this strategy as flawed even in the best of times. The reason why was ironically demonstrated by Quibi’s own Super Bowl ad where a crew of bank robbers is forced to wait for the getaway driver to finish his Quibi episode: the length of these chapters is too long for the in between moments of our lives. If you had to wait 7 to 10 minutes for coffee, you’d find another cafe.

When I see people killing time on their phones, they are texting, reading email, or scrolling through social media. Social media “bites” each require only a few seconds to consume. TikTok, the dominant video social media platform limits content to 15 seconds. The closest successful analog to Quibi in terms of content length is YouTube, but in my experience YouTube content is consumed when people have more time and is often watched on a laptop or TV in addition to phones (my son watches a lot of YouTube and always uses his iPad, never his phone).

Of course you can pause your Quibi chapter at any time and come back to it later, but if you don’t watch shows based on when episodes begin and end, then it’s just as easy to watch Netflix. In a time where entire seasons are consumed in long stretches, an episode boundary is a signal to the watcher of when they can take a breather.

Quibi was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, two highly successful businesspeople in their 60s who believe that short-form, Hollywood-quality video is the next big thing for today’s smartphone addicted youth. My guess is that the response they’ll get is “ok boomer.”