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Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman revealed their latest plans for their short-form, mobile-first TV service Quibi, per NBC News.
Quibi now has a launch date set for April 2020, with plans to host more than 100 pieces of original content per week — meaning that it will be making over 5,000 pieces of content per year — and will charge subs $5 a month with ads and $8 a month without ads.
Industry observers have expressed skepticism about whether people will pay a monthly sub fee to watch premium, "HBO-quality" video that is short and mobile-only.Even Meg Whitman acknowledged that the difficulty of predicting the venture's future: “It’s very hard to research and ask customers about something that doesn’t exist today. We’re using a lot of judgment and we’ll know if it works when it launches.”
We believe that Quibi could be successful for the following reasons:
- It has landed buzzy content and big names. Katzenberg announced a slate of original content for the platform that will include a docu-series about Snapchat's founding called “Frat Boy Genius," a reality series from Jennifer Lopez’s production company, and two short-form daily newscasts including one from the BBC. Quibi has also been linked to filmmakers Sam Raimi and Guillermo del Toro, producer Jason Blum, music mogul Justin Timberlake, and basketball superstar Kobe Bryant. Not to mention Katzenberg himself, the former CEO of DreamWorks Animation, whose track record is littered with successes where others saw long shots.
- Mobile will become the first screen in 2019, in terms of time spent. This year, mobile is expected to surpass TV as the medium attracting the most minutes among US adults — in 2018, mobile users spent 3 hours, 35 minutes on mobile devices, up 11 minutes year-over-year (YoY), per eMarketer.
- Quibi is aimed at millennials, who are both less likely to watch traditional TV and more willing to pay for apps. Quibi will target millennial viewers ages 25-35 — a demo that has seen its traditional TV viewership fall off steeply in recent years compared with older generations. Further, young people might be more comfortable paying for mobile apps than older generations: 64% of mobile users ages 18-34 paid to download an app, versus just 20% of those ages 55 and older, per comScore.
Ultimately, Quibi’s uphill battle will be differentiating its use case from social video and SVOD like Netflix. Quibi’s most direct competition for video on mobile devices will come from social platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, and Snapchat that have been pushing heavily into new video formats over the past two years — including short-form, premium content designated for mobile consumption.
Whitman argued that they don't expect to steal share from viewing that's happening on other platforms, but that it will aim to be additive. To do that, Quibi will need to reconceptualize video content for mobile devices, situating itself in between SVOD and social platforms. To that end, Whitman said, “What you can’t do is take an hour-long TV show and chop it up…[Quibi content] has to be written and shot for this use case."
Further, as a subscription video service where users will be paying a monthly sub fee, Quibi will need to make itself "must-have" amid competition from a growing number of SVOD services launching over the next year and into 2020, including services from Disney, WarnerMedia, and Apple.
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