Quibi Competes With Social Media, Not TV. It May Make Both Better

(Bloomberg Businessweek) -- When Quibi (pronounced “kwih-BEE”) was introduced, the masterminds behind it had us right where they wanted: trapped at home, with little to do but obsessively clean and watch hours of content.

Yet, after a week of testing, it’s a little hard for me to tell how I’ll slot the app’s hundreds of roughly seven-minute episodes into my life when things return to normal. Certainly not at night, when the glow of the jumbo television screen lures me in. And not during the one- or two-minute spare windows in the day I use to check Facebook. I’ll be honest. Quibi-ing is what I want to do when work feels tedious—and I know my boss isn’t paying attention.

The mobile-only app has raised almost $2 billion from the world’s biggest media companies to inundate customers with star-studded Quibis. (Liam Hemsworth, Chrissy Teigen, and LeBron James each headline a program.) Quibi Holdings LLC’s founder, Hollywood veteran Jeffrey Katzenberg, says the company will churn out 175 shows in its first year. All of them will be told in segments of no longer than 10 minutes and can be viewed both horizontally and vertically.

The platform has been touted as a big risk and a revolution, but the experience of it feels inevitable. We’re all already addicted to our phones, filling empty expanses of time—once the dominion of our imaginations—with podcasts, listicles, and TikToks. So the argument for Quibi’s existence sounds a lot like the argument for legalizing pot: People are already getting a fix, so the experts may as well provide it.

The shows on the service range from grating to pretty good. In standout series Survive, Sophie Turner convincingly depicts a young woman tortured by suicidal thoughts, only to find herself fighting for her life after a plane crash. In standout-for-the-wrong-reasons series Murder House Flip, designers renovate a house where a real serial killer buried her victims, treating the homicides as an entertaining twist.

Whether Quibi is the best Hollywood can do doesn’t really matter. The service will certainly be improved. Katzenberg says the company is going to respond to data about who clicks on what and when, and relatively quickly. For example, he wants to offer one episode of a show per day but will release them all at once if people seem to prefer bingeing.

What matters more is that someone set a new financial bar, spending as much as $125,000 a minute for high-quality mobile videos. First it was the theater, then the television screen, and now phones are the domain of the world’s best entertainers. Several of the shows—like Hemsworth’s Most Dangerous Game—are as good as what you can get on Netflix, which dominated Oscar and Golden Globe nominations this year.

I can tell you that spending some real time with the app changed my standards more than my habits. I’m a millennial, so I’m used to wasting time scrolling through videos. I’m still doing that, but now the cinematography is nice, and they have well-thought-out stories and messages that occasionally pose an intellectual challenge.

Initial reviews argued that Quibi suffers from not being able to appear on a TV or laptop, and a week after launch, Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman told Bloomberg TV that she hopes to roll out TV viewing within six months. But I found it competes more with Instagram, which I peruse during my commute and those illicit work breaks. The quality of the app’s programming made me realize what I really want from social media is just content from my good friends. The rest is simply killing time. The main frustration with Quibi is that the shows are good enough that, unlike with Facebook content, I don’t want to experience them alone. The app does have a button to share, but it’s not the same. I also tried watching an episode of Dishmantled, where blindfolded chefs must determine the contents of a meal that’s blasted at their face through a cannon, with my husband, who was seated next to me. I kept clumsily dropping the phone, which ruined the effect.

To sustain itself, Quibi will probably need about 12 million subscribers—it garnered 1.7 million in its first week—with 75% paying the $5-a-month subscription fee with ads (it’s $8 a month without ads). In the midst of epic unemployment, that feels steep. I’m fortunate to have a job, and I kinda like Quibi, yet I’m still not sure if I’ll stick with it. But heck, if I don’t, I’d miss it a lot more than all those celebrities singing Imagine.

©2020 Bloomberg L.P.