[Update: I wrote this 07/11/2020 on substack. Quibi has since been shutdown. I still standby by my argument made in this piece that Quibi has shows us the glimpse of the future. ]
Hello everyone,
Storytelling is central to humanity and it has adopted new form-factors as new communication mediums emerged: print -> Theatre -> Radio -> Cinema -> TV -> Mobile & Internet. However, storytelling format has not caught up to internet and mobile, yet !
Quibi is trying to bring a story-telling format made for mobile. Its a short-form, movie-grade video streaming Los Angeles based startup that grabbed everyone’s attention by raising ~2B even before launching the product. Today we will be doing a Quibi teardown to understand the chances of success of this product, what we think is working well with this product and what can be improved.
Now, when you read a `short-form` video, it’s very tempting to compare it to `TikTok` and dismiss it, but Quibi is more closer to Netflix/Hulu as you will see later.
Use case that Quibi is solving for:
For on the go high-quality entertainment that is byte-sized and made for mobile from scratch.
- Byte-sized : You can think of it as a series where the length of each episode is 7-9 minutes. A series can have 5-10 episodes. If you are waiting for a bus, train and you have 5 minutes, you can watch a full episode of these shows.
- High-quality: Professionally made featuring some of the biggest names in entertainment (Sophie Turner from GOT fame, Chrissy Teigen and many many more).
- Made for mobile: The videos and camera angles change depending upon whether you are viewing them in portrait or landscape more. It means they have two sets of recordings for each show. This is also verified by almost twice data usage by Quibi for the same video length compared to its other competitors.
What works:
- The byte sized nature of videos. You don’t have to commit fully and you can decide after watching first episode which lasts only 5 minutes
- The storytelling is crisper because of this format
- Content made for mobile lends to the form-factor very well and its a refreshing experience to watch it on mobile.
What doesn’t:
- Content pool is smaller compared to some of its bigger competitors like Prime/Netflix
- Personalization is absolutely broken because of a smaller content pool.
Future directions for the company
It’s clear that the current model of spending billions of dollars producing super high-quality shows is not going to scale even for a well-established company let alone a new company. You may wonder if Disney can have a content platform, why not Quibi. Well, Disney has 50 years of content pool produced in the past that it can bank on when it launched its own streaming service. One more data point: Only 11% of Netflix content in 2018 was original.
So what would you do, if you were the CEO/CPO at Quibi:
- As the byte sized nature of videos and the form factor are the two things working in favor of the company, I would provide a platform for all kinds of amateur/professional video creators to create these videos. Currently, it’s only limited to hollywood
- Use reviews/ratings/match to surface the most engaging content to the individual users. It needs to be done later in the game when you have enough videos to gather enough data about an individual user.
Quibi has shown us a glimpse into the future
Quibi has shown us that deep storytelling can be adopted to a mobile form-factor but it has still not taken advantage of the massive capabilities of the internet. Some of its other competitors like Tik Tok are taking advantage of the internet but they lack the deep story-telling aspect.
Wrapping up, I am hopeful that byte-sized, made for mobile, deep storytelling is here to stay. I am just not sure whether Quibi is going to do it or someone else.
[sibwp_form id=2]