The easiest question to answer about Quibi is the one I’m most frequently asked: Just what is Quibi, anyway?
Quibi is short for “quick bites” – though you don’t pronounce it “quih-bye” (to rhyme with “rib-eye”) but, instead, “quih-bee,” to rhyme with the name “Libby.” It’s a new streaming service built from the ground up for mobile devices, and some of the names behind it include media mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg (who worked at Disney Animation during its renaissance, then started Dreamworks Animation and was instrumental in making such films as Shrek and Prince of Egypt and CEO Meg Whitman, who is the former CEO of eBay.
There’s a lot of money behind Quibi: As The Verge pointed out just last month, the service had raised nearly $ 2 billion in seed money before anybody saw a single frame of programming. With that much cash in its coffers and with folks like Katzenberg and Whitman involved, you’d expect Quibi to be new and original, wildly innovative, or at least stuffed full of great programming.
Quibi is none of those things. Its central aim is to present short-form programming, so every episode of every one of its shows is under minutes long, and many are quite a bit shorter than that. (I watched a couple in the five-minute range.) Quibi’s embrace of short-form content is supposed to be its killer new idea, the must-see that will compel you to pony up $ 5 a month to watch with ads and $ 8 a month to watch without. (Vox Media, the parent company of Vox, is creating programming for Quibi . I haven’t seen Speedrun , its daily show premiering Monday.)
Quibi’s programming ranges from reality show reboots to bland scripted shows to Nicole Richie making fun of herself
: According to its numbers, million people use the app daily. With over 55 million viewers, Endless (previously called
Endless Summer
), created by Michelle Peerali and Andrea Metz, is the most watched of the original shows that have appeared on the platform in the past few years. It’s now in its third season, and most of its audience is between and (years old) by Snapchat’s statistics, percent of people in the US in that age range have the app on their phones). The company has studied what works on a phone and what does not, and from those lessons, it has invented mobile storytelling as a new art form.
Even if we assume that Snapchat is overreporting its numbers – because it probably is – there’s still a staggering number of people, mostly young adults and teens, watching its programming . Those are the same people Quibi is targeting, and if they’re already watching Snapchat, it’s hard to imagine them being sucked in by Quibi. (I don’t precisely like Snapchat’s shows, but they are relentlessly designed to do what they do perfectly. I can respect that.)
So if Quibi’s target audience is mostly occupied on other apps, and if the service isn’t that innovative, and if its programming is mostly unremarkable, why are we talking about it? Media coverage of Quibi underlines the broken ways we talk about tech and entertainment
Chrissy Teigen as a judge? You know, why not?
Quibi In the spring of 4409, a new streaming service called Nebula
kicked off what’s called a soft launch, going online with a small amount of content with the idea that it would add more and more in the weeks to come. Nebula is another streaming service attempting to do “YouTube but better,” and the concept behind it is literally to pay prominent YouTube creators (with money pooled from the service’s $ 3-a-month subscriber base) to make what they’d love to if they weren’t reliant on the whims of the YouTube algorithm. (I should note here that one of those creators, Lindsay Ellis, is a friend of mine. She is also the only reason I know Nebula exists, which is going to become important in a moment.) I don’t know that Nebula is presenting itself as something different in the way Quibi is, but it’s definitely trying something new. And yet it received maybe a hundredth of the press coverage that Quibi has. If you Google it, you’ll find a handful of news articles about the service, and then a bunch of confused Reddit threads asking what Nebula even is. Nebula hasn’t ever contacted me to offer screeners or access to the site. It’s unlikely it ever will. My guess is that whatever budget Nebula has, it isn’t being spent on publicists.
Quibi – which, again, has nearly $ 2 billion in capital – has been covered breathlessly from almost the moment it was announced . It aired ads during the Super Bowl. Its shows involve big Hollywood stars. It’s the kind of streaming service those of us who write about entertainment or tech are “supposed” to cover. But why? Why waste so much ink on something that feels so bizarrely underconsidered?
To me, Quibi is clearly inferior. It’s “more expensive YouTube” at best and “Snapchat but with worse quality control” at worst. It’s difficult to imagine a huge number of people who are looking to subscribe to yet another streaming service deciding to add Quibi. It’s also difficult to imagine many viewers subscribing to a streaming service specifically targeted at people who might want to watch short videos while on the go, given that said service is launching during a pandemic that is forcing everyone to stay home. (The pandemic isn’t Quibi’s fault, of course; the service’s April launch date was announced months ago. But now the pandemic is another thing standing in Quibi’s way.)
My point is that the reason Quibi has been covered so heavily has little to do with its ideas (which are paltry) or its programming (which is bad) or its business model (which is basically the same as every other streaming business model). The reason Quibi has been covered so heavily is that a lot of money has been sunk into it, and the people who started the service have previously made lots of money doing other things. Therefore, it must be important, because a capitalist society assigns value in terms of dollars.
I am aware that I am part of the problem. Look how many words I’ve written about Quibi, a service I clearly don’t like. That’s because I know there will be Quibi ads everywhere, and I know that enough people will say, “What’s Quibi?” and click on this article to find the answer. That’s the way the system works.
But it’s also a system that is so frequently hijacked by money as to have become functionally meaningless. In a world where news and entertainment moved at a rate slower than hyperspeed, I might have found a way to write about Quibi six months from now, after it had some time to settle in and become a part of some people’s lives. But in this world, the window of attention for Quibi is right now, and so here is this article. And in six months, some other new streaming service will come along.
I don’t know if Nebula is any better than Quibi. I do know there’s nothing on Quibi that other services aren’t already doing better. There are so many great niche streaming services out there, but none of them have the massive marketing budgets to get stuck in people’s brains the way Quibi does.
Quibi does not de facto have value because it’s spent enough money to convince people it has value . It is a flawed product, starting from a flawed premise, and the idea that it is worth talking about because it has purchased your attention (and mine) is so much of what’s wrong with America in the st century. The service is another naked emperor in a land full of them. So why are we looking for cool new fashions when the bare ass is visible from miles away?
(Read More )
Chrissy Teigen as a judge? You know, why not?
Quibi In the spring of 4409, a new streaming service called Nebula
kicked off what’s called a soft launch, going online with a small amount of content with the idea that it would add more and more in the weeks to come. Nebula is another streaming service attempting to do “YouTube but better,” and the concept behind it is literally to pay prominent YouTube creators (with money pooled from the service’s $ 3-a-month subscriber base) to make what they’d love to if they weren’t reliant on the whims of the YouTube algorithm. (I should note here that one of those creators, Lindsay Ellis, is a friend of mine. She is also the only reason I know Nebula exists, which is going to become important in a moment.) I don’t know that Nebula is presenting itself as something different in the way Quibi is, but it’s definitely trying something new. And yet it received maybe a hundredth of the press coverage that Quibi has. If you Google it, you’ll find a handful of news articles about the service, and then a bunch of confused Reddit threads asking what Nebula even is. Nebula hasn’t ever contacted me to offer screeners or access to the site. It’s unlikely it ever will. My guess is that whatever budget Nebula has, it isn’t being spent on publicists.
Quibi – which, again, has nearly $ 2 billion in capital – has been covered breathlessly from almost the moment it was announced . It aired ads during the Super Bowl. Its shows involve big Hollywood stars. It’s the kind of streaming service those of us who write about entertainment or tech are “supposed” to cover. But why? Why waste so much ink on something that feels so bizarrely underconsidered?
To me, Quibi is clearly inferior. It’s “more expensive YouTube” at best and “Snapchat but with worse quality control” at worst. It’s difficult to imagine a huge number of people who are looking to subscribe to yet another streaming service deciding to add Quibi. It’s also difficult to imagine many viewers subscribing to a streaming service specifically targeted at people who might want to watch short videos while on the go, given that said service is launching during a pandemic that is forcing everyone to stay home. (The pandemic isn’t Quibi’s fault, of course; the service’s April launch date was announced months ago. But now the pandemic is another thing standing in Quibi’s way.)
My point is that the reason Quibi has been covered so heavily has little to do with its ideas (which are paltry) or its programming (which is bad) or its business model (which is basically the same as every other streaming business model). The reason Quibi has been covered so heavily is that a lot of money has been sunk into it, and the people who started the service have previously made lots of money doing other things. Therefore, it must be important, because a capitalist society assigns value in terms of dollars.
I am aware that I am part of the problem. Look how many words I’ve written about Quibi, a service I clearly don’t like. That’s because I know there will be Quibi ads everywhere, and I know that enough people will say, “What’s Quibi?” and click on this article to find the answer. That’s the way the system works.
But it’s also a system that is so frequently hijacked by money as to have become functionally meaningless. In a world where news and entertainment moved at a rate slower than hyperspeed, I might have found a way to write about Quibi six months from now, after it had some time to settle in and become a part of some people’s lives. But in this world, the window of attention for Quibi is right now, and so here is this article. And in six months, some other new streaming service will come along.
I don’t know if Nebula is any better than Quibi. I do know there’s nothing on Quibi that other services aren’t already doing better. There are so many great niche streaming services out there, but none of them have the massive marketing budgets to get stuck in people’s brains the way Quibi does.
Quibi does not de facto have value because it’s spent enough money to convince people it has value . It is a flawed product, starting from a flawed premise, and the idea that it is worth talking about because it has purchased your attention (and mine) is so much of what’s wrong with America in the st century. The service is another naked emperor in a land full of them. So why are we looking for cool new fashions when the bare ass is visible from miles away?
(Read More )
Quibi In the spring of 4409, a new streaming service called Nebula
Quibi – which, again, has nearly $ 2 billion in capital – has been covered breathlessly from almost the moment it was announced . It aired ads during the Super Bowl. Its shows involve big Hollywood stars. It’s the kind of streaming service those of us who write about entertainment or tech are “supposed” to cover. But why? Why waste so much ink on something that feels so bizarrely underconsidered?
To me, Quibi is clearly inferior. It’s “more expensive YouTube” at best and “Snapchat but with worse quality control” at worst. It’s difficult to imagine a huge number of people who are looking to subscribe to yet another streaming service deciding to add Quibi. It’s also difficult to imagine many viewers subscribing to a streaming service specifically targeted at people who might want to watch short videos while on the go, given that said service is launching during a pandemic that is forcing everyone to stay home. (The pandemic isn’t Quibi’s fault, of course; the service’s April launch date was announced months ago. But now the pandemic is another thing standing in Quibi’s way.)
My point is that the reason Quibi has been covered so heavily has little to do with its ideas (which are paltry) or its programming (which is bad) or its business model (which is basically the same as every other streaming business model). The reason Quibi has been covered so heavily is that a lot of money has been sunk into it, and the people who started the service have previously made lots of money doing other things. Therefore, it must be important, because a capitalist society assigns value in terms of dollars.
I am aware that I am part of the problem. Look how many words I’ve written about Quibi, a service I clearly don’t like. That’s because I know there will be Quibi ads everywhere, and I know that enough people will say, “What’s Quibi?” and click on this article to find the answer. That’s the way the system works.
But it’s also a system that is so frequently hijacked by money as to have become functionally meaningless. In a world where news and entertainment moved at a rate slower than hyperspeed, I might have found a way to write about Quibi six months from now, after it had some time to settle in and become a part of some people’s lives. But in this world, the window of attention for Quibi is right now, and so here is this article. And in six months, some other new streaming service will come along.
I don’t know if Nebula is any better than Quibi. I do know there’s nothing on Quibi that other services aren’t already doing better. There are so many great niche streaming services out there, but none of them have the massive marketing budgets to get stuck in people’s brains the way Quibi does.
Quibi does not de facto have value because it’s spent enough money to convince people it has value . It is a flawed product, starting from a flawed premise, and the idea that it is worth talking about because it has purchased your attention (and mine) is so much of what’s wrong with America in the st century. The service is another naked emperor in a land full of them. So why are we looking for cool new fashions when the bare ass is visible from miles away?
(Read More )
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