Quibi Hopes to Woo Viewers by Blasting Food Into People’s Faces
Quibi Hopes to Woo Viewers by Blasting Food Into People’s Faces
(Bloomberg) -- A cooking contest where competitors are slammed in the face with meals fired out of a cannon. A show about customized dog houses called “Barkitecture.” And a home-renovation program that “removes the stains” from houses where murders were committed.
The ideas are among those new streaming service Quibi Holdings LLC hopes will win over audiences and potential subscribers.
After raising almost $2 billion from investors across Hollywood, Silicon Valley and Wall Street, the video startup launches next month, offering movies and shows that are chopped up into roughly seven-minute segments. The idea is to give consumers professionally produced content they can watch on their phones, providing an alternative to sites like YouTube and TikTok.
The company unveiled its programming slate on Friday. And it shows that the startup’s leaders, movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and former HP Inc. Chief Executive Officer Meg Whitman, think the world is ready to embrace the strange.
Besides the unusual reality show fare, the service will offer more standard scripted shows and news programs. In “Fierce Queens,” Reese Witherspoon highlights “fabulous females of the animal kingdom,” while in “Survive,” Sophie Turner is a plane-crash survivor who must go through a harrowing journey through the wilderness with the only other passenger that is still alive.
Other stars who have made shows for the service include Jennifer Lopez, Mark Wahlberg and Idris Elba. The service expects to launch with 50 shows on April 6. In its first year, it will release 175 original shows with 8,500 “quick bites of content.”
The question is whether consumers will be willing to pay $5 a month to watch wacky stunts and quirky comedies when YouTube has conditioned them to get bite-size clips for free.
Quibi has plenty of media giants waiting to find out. The company has raised money from Walt Disney Co., Comcast Corp.’s NBCUniversal and AT&T Inc.’s WarnerMedia, among others, which are all betting there’s money to be made from the world’s shortening attention spans.
To contact the reporter on this story: Kelly Gilblom in Los Angeles at kgilblom@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Nick Turner at nturner7@bloomberg.net
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