Jeffrey Katzenberg, founder with Steven Spielberg of the huge studio Dreamworks, released this week the long-awaited and overfunded microseries platform Quibi — short for Quick Bites. We’ve been testing it, and took notes in order to learn from their wise moves and mistakes.
UX-UI
Probably, Quibi is the most beautiful mobile video platform ever developed, with a sleek design, great functionalities and a lot of incredible visual effects and motion UI. However, it is not very friendly for discovering new content… which is not a problem at this stage, since they don’t have much content to be discovered. Quibi debuted with 50 shows, and promises to have 175 by the end of the year. Doing a simple math, if we calculate an average of two hours per every “quick bite” of content in the platform, it totals 100 hours of content. It may sound like a lot of content, but any regular video platforms, like Netflix, have more than 10,000 hours of content to choose from.
As it is a platform intended for mobile consumption, there is no smart TV app, neither a web platform. Users cannot either cast their mobile screens into a TV.
The most interesting feature of the platform is called Turnstyle, which allows you to seamlessly switch between portrait and landscape video playback modes, making the most out of both modes with a different framing for each of them. Turnstyle can also be used for interactivity by letting you choose between two angles — though that capability isn’t available in any shows at launch. It works! it works super fine and effortlessly moves from one orientation — and framing — to the other without stopping the show.
Content
The content is great so far, with some trashy reality shows — Chrissy’s Court, Dishmantled — and a couple of high budget fiction stories — such as Most Dangerous game starred by Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. These shows cannot compete with the biggest productions of Netflix, HBO, Amazon Prime or Hulu — House of Cards, Game of Thrones, The Handmaid Tale — but are attractive enough to keep a user like me — I’m 41 years old — starring at my phone for a couple of minutes. Hours? I don’t really think so. I’d rather switch to a bigger screen.
Model
Quibi is a SVOD platform, it means that it is competing with Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney+ trying to attract users to their $7,99 monthly subscription. It also offers a $4,99 plan if you don’t mind watching a lot of advertising between episodes and when downloading content to you phone. However, the latter option doesn’t apply yet to South America, from where I’m testing the app.
Conclusion
Quibi’s interface is beautifully designed for a 40yo that is used to Apple products. The subscription model is great for a 40yo that is used to pay for Netflix, Disney+ and still have money for a third streaming service. Quibi’s content is a mix of shows for grown ups — used to 25–50 minutes shows on a screen as bigger as possible— chopped into pieces to fit the attention span of a teenager, and reduced in size to fit only a mobile screen. Turnstyle is amazing for youngsters, used to watch and shoot amateur content on portrait mode. But this platform doesn’t seem to be designed for them.
Building a microseries platform, that can be only consumed on mobile, is still a great idea waiting for a player that understands the whole picture. If you’re building a platform that seems to be created for a new batch of young users — Netflix model is already old —you need to bring them a disruptive platform, social interactions and content that their parents won’t like. In addition, you need to offer them a model they can afford. Teenagers are not used to paying for content and, even if they are keen on paying, they don’t have the means, and would have to ask for daddy’s credit card.
Quibi is not the first of its class, Blackpills and Estudio+ where two previous examples of unsuccessful microseries platforms. They both failed by choosing the wrong target and a model that made them competitors of giant players, such as Netflix.
Short form series are meant for a new audience, and this new audience has only one rule: my content, my community, my means.
