Quibi: A New Streaming Service Exclusively for Smartphones
Got up, made some coffee, read an article about the death of Hollywood. I never really know what Hollywood is, anyway. Didn’t the idea of Hollywood change irrevocably once an international audience became the main source of income for big budget movies?
But any industry that continually regurgitates its past will progressively marginalise itself. And Quentin Tarantino is a director who made a career out of harking back to past cinematic glories. The world changes faster and faster, are you ready to change with it?
Then I found out about this platform called Quibi. An unusual name which apparently is constructed from the words Quick and Bites. The plan is to take new, premium films shot by award-winning directors like Steven Spielberg and Catherine Hardwicke and present them in short episodic chapters about 10 minutes long.
If that sounds familiar, you may have been one of those like me who used to search YouTube for difficult to find movies. When YouTube first started, uploads were limited to 10 minutes, so people would break down a movie and upload it in pieces. That’s how I watched John Cassavetes Woman Under The Influence for the first time.
I’m not sure viewing in 10 minute bites improved the experience.
Exclusively for mobile
The difference between Quibi and early YouTube is the stories will be developed exclusively for viewing on mobile phones. The content will be distributed through an app. And that app will be designed by a tech team that has “consulted with Hollywood creators to make an interface that is appealing to filmmakers and elusive younger audiences”.
The whole project is the brain-child of veteran film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and tech executive Meg Whitman.
I mean, it’s great to see innovation. I truly believe we need to look forward to stay fresh and relevant.
“What we say internally is we’d like to be the quality of HBO and offer customers the convenience of Spotify,” Whitman has said.
However, the discussion about streaming and file sharing over the last 20 years has been one of trying to hold back the tide. But in reality, it means greatly reduced budgets and reduced income for creators.
Quibi has $1 billion to play with from Disney and WarnerMedia. But when you compare that to Netflix, who are slated to spend $15 billion on its original content in 2019, it doesn’t look so impressive.
Competing against YouTube
The main challenge for streaming platforms is to produce enough content to keep your subscribers happy. And that content has to be at a certain quality level too, to justify the subscription.
Meanwhile, YouTube charges nothing to watchers (but you have the option to join their subscription ad-free version). And most content is created with zero to just above zero budget levels. Viewer don’t expect high production values, but they do expect entertaining and/or informative content.
If you subscribe to a few YouTube channels you will never be wanting for stuff to watch. However, don’t expect high level series like Game of Thrones or Stranger Things.
The problem with streaming…
Amazon Prime tried to ease the lack of content problem by opening their platform up to anyone. Any filmmaker can upload their film, just like YouTube. Although Amazon are more likely to remove any film if they get too many complaints. They also don’t reward content creators as well as YouTube.
Netflix’s game is to become the Facebook of film and TV streaming. Their strategy for success if to dominate the market so viewers don’t go anywhere else for home screen entertainment. However, since 2011 Netflix has not yet made a profit and is reported to have a negative cash flow of $3.5 billion forecast for this year.
The problem with streaming is the ever increasing need to create content whilst paying less to produce it, if you want to make a profit. So the Netflix strategy is to own most of the viewers thereby creating enough income to pay for more crowd pleasing shows.
But what do customers say?
Since the arrival of TV subscription services, customers complain they want to watch shows from different platforms but often don’t want to pay for multiple subscriptions.
Now, would you pay a subscription to a service you can ONLY watch on your smartphone? Isn’t that an inbuilt disadvantage? Especially as one of the main advantages of streaming is to watch when you want, where you want.
Quibi will charge about $5 a month with ads and $8 without. But the app will face an increasingly crowded video streaming market when it launches next April.
To me, it still feels like applying old ideas to new technology. It’s as if the thinking is inspired by buzzwords like “smartphones!” and “apps!” without really understanding too well what these things really mean for the industry.
eMarketer research shows a rise in the average amount of time consumers spend daily watching video on their smartphones and tablets. In 2012 it was 6 minutes, in 2018 it was 60. But the really big question is how much are people willing to pay for it?
How times have changed for cinema
When cinema was invented, the audience had a simple choice: pay to watch it at a theatre or don’t watch anything.
Then TV came along, but cinema survived through the 1960s to 2000s by offering high quality. And still you had to pay to see it in a theatre or wait for it to appear on TV.
But cinema no longer has that offer of exclusivity for customers – the relationship has flipped.
Whereas the customer used to ask, “How can I watch your movie?” they now ask, “Why should I spend my valuable time watching your movie?”
“And you want me to pay for it as well? In that case, I really need to be sure.”
Some interesting ideas?
It’s reported that the company plans to amass more than 7,000 pieces of content in its first year. And there are some interesting ideas being put forward. For example, Steven Spielberg’s After Dark series will be programmed only to screen after sundown.
Quibi users will be able to view videos vertically or horizontally by changing how they hold their phones, like they already can with other platforms such as YouTube and Facebook. The company says this opens the possibilities for filmmakers to experiment with the way films are presented.
Perhaps more interesting though is what filmmaker Veena Sud says about a Quibi series called The Stranger. If a viewer clicks “like” on the show, new episodes will be announced on a viewer’s phone using a creepy ringtone used in the show.
“Unlike the traditional screens that we watch TV shows and movies on, this is the screen that is attached to most of our hands 24/7,” said Sud. Quibi allows filmmakers to “break every single wall between you and the audience and to draw your viewer out of passivity into actually being part of the story.”
Deja Vu?
Hm. Problem is, it wasn’t so long ago VR was going to save us. You know, blurring the lines between reality and fiction, just like video games do… Does anyone still use ringtones these days, anyway?
Although I’m just getting a deja vu feeling about all this it’s good to see a new approach to video format.
Writing to fit the 10 minute episode has been around since web series came and went. But perhaps those series didn’t have the financial muscle behind them to give them the boost they needed. Or perhaps they were a little ahead of their time and only now are viewers catching up with the “bite size” episode idea.
It’s actually something we’ve been doing with the Silent Eye series. Except, our 10-15 minute episodes are self contained stories. My aim was to fit as much story as I possibly could into this compressed format.
Video Revolution
In my opinion, real revolution will not come from trying to fit old ideas into new technology. Neither will it come from creators using methods developed for old forms of distribution, like movie theatres and television sets.
Instead it will only come when creators arrive who see the distribution method as the artform.
Instead of using smartphones to create and watch old style movies, the revolution will come when they become the artform itself. And then we won’t use smartphones to make “cinematic” movies, we’ll use smartphones to make smartphone movies.
For the first time in the history of the moving image, the equipment we use to film is the same equipment we use to watch. And one day we will realise Hollywood is not some distant land, actually Hollywood is us and we carry it around in our pockets.
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