Quibi in Trouble

[Gary T]

Looks it's over and Quibi will soon be no more!

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/...end-katzenberg

[James0b57]

Looks it's over and Quibi will soon be no more!

https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/...end-katzenberg

Well, that lasted a quibi.

[ahalpert]

I know that people lost their jobs, and I'm sad about that. But I'm 0% surprised. and to add insult to injury, not only did no one want to buy quibi, nobody even wants to pick up their content...

[Gary T]

Well, that lasted a quibi.

Nice! You have been saving that for 6 months, haven't you?

[High1ander]

I don't really like to be a negative Nancy, but some business ventures just seems way to stupid to make money. I don't know anyone that really watches short form, even at the film schools I attended people wouldn't really bother "watching them" (even though we were all making them as well), and nobody would certainly pay for it. The equivalent would be a 30 sec only Spotify-subscription with songs only being max 30 sec, who would buy that? Sure there is a huge need for songs that are 30 sec (commercials, etc.) but nobody wants to "consume" that. Quibi could have worked 15 years ago pre-youtube and pre-netflix, but now it is way, way, way too much of a niche market to warrant its existence in "main stream".

[NorBro]

I like short-form, but the problem for them is that most can get it on YouTube.

Not exclusive content but enough from various interests to be content.

[High1ander]

I like short-form, but the problem for them is that most can get it on YouTube.

Not exclusive content but enough from various interests to be content.

Exactly, and that's why I mean, this could have been quite OK prior to youtube, but right now it is such a limited upgrade than what you basically get for free. I remember the days I was in film school, 2004-2010, I really wanted to watch some "best short winner", but good luck getting a hold of them. Now and then I could get a hold of a winner or nominated short, but not really enough to see where the "bar" was for short films, eventually I saw that the majority of "good shorts" also had pretty fat budgets, I mean they had maybe like 10-40k $ budgets, and what was being "upheld as good" was polished turds rather than original/good storytelling. Of course some exceptions, I remember one short that worked as proof of concept that later became a pretty good long form, Cashback 2004 nominated best short, 2006 long version.

[davedv]

It doesn't seem too likely that Quibi's demise is due to bad timing as a result of the pandemic either. Apparently nearly half of households worldwide have subscribed to at least one new streaming service in the past 6 months:
https://www.limelight.com/resources/...o-2020/#nearly

So in many ways it has been a better time than ever to launch a subscription streaming service. But evidently they were not subscribing to Quibi, but likely joined one of the new services with much better established content libraries such as Disney+, HBO Max, or Peacock or some of the better established existing offerings like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video.

One thing that I do find kind of interesting, is that the 30 minute or 60 minute forms for episodic scripted content seems to be largely a historical artifact of the needs of broadcast television schedules. And the while episode lengths due tend to vary somewhat for shows delivered via streaming services, it seems like for the most part they tend to gravitate toward roughly 30 or 60 minute episodes. There are not a ton of examples (that I can come up with anyway) of really successful short-form scripted, episodic content. Even though there is nothing stopping any of the streaming services from producing such content. Even on YouTube, which has a ton of short form videos, there isn't really much in the way of traditional scripted content.

So I'm not really sure what to attribute this to. Is it just because we are in a transitional period away from broadcast television right now, so people are still adapting to the new medium, and eventually we will see lots of content of all different lengths? Are shorter formats just hard to make work from a storytelling perspective? Or is it something else entirely?

[ahalpert]

It doesn't seem too likely that Quibi's demise is due to bad timing as a result of the pandemic either. Apparently nearly half of households worldwide have subscribed to at least one new streaming service in the past 6 months:
https://www.limelight.com/resources/...o-2020/#nearly

So in many ways it has been a better time than ever to launch a subscription streaming service. But evidently they were not subscribing to Quibi, but likely joined one of the new services with much better established content libraries such as Disney+, HBO Max, or Peacock or some of the better established existing offerings like Netflix, Hulu, or Amazon Prime Video.

One thing that I do find kind of interesting, is that the 30 minute or 60 minute forms for episodic scripted content seems to be largely a historical artifact of the needs of broadcast television schedules. And the while episode lengths due tend to vary somewhat for shows delivered via streaming services, it seems like for the most part they tend to gravitate toward roughly 30 or 60 minute episodes. There are not a ton of examples (that I can come up with anyway) of really successful short-form scripted, episodic content. Even though there is nothing stopping any of the streaming services from producing such content. Even on YouTube, which has a ton of short form videos, there isn't really much in the way of traditional scripted content.

So I'm not really sure what to attribute this to. Is it just because we are in a transitional period away from broadcast television right now, so people are still adapting to the new medium, and eventually we will see lots of content of all different lengths? Are shorter formats just hard to make work from a storytelling perspective? Or is it something else entirely?

I think short form kind of sucks. I mean, you could break up a longer story into short chunks. I'm rewatching star trek Voyager now and, like all commercially-interrupted shows, it ends with a dramatic beat or mini-cliffhanger before fading to commercial breaks and then has some expository dialogue to reestablish the scenario after it fades back in. Every chunk between commercial breaks could be an "episode" right? But yeah, I dont think you can satisfyingly tell much story in less than 15 minutes. Give yourself a half hour or an hour and you can go into more depth and have multiple subplots. Look at how much more plot your typical written short story has. as much as a feature. And a full-length novel always strains the feature format. They did the hobbit in 3 movies and that was a children's book.

Quibi's supposed excuse was that it was designed for commuters. Straphangers could watch a full episode or two on the train and then chat about it around the water cooler. So they claimed that remote work killed them. I'm not so sure.

I think that sticking to 30- and 60-minute episodes (but wasn't it really 23 and 46?) Is a holdover from the previous era, for both writers/producers and audiences. There may be more variety of durations coming. But maybe not - I think that people like consistent, predictable chunks of time. Many online newspapers post the average reading time of an article next to the headline so you can decide if you're willing to invest that much time in the topic, ha.

Tangentially, I feel like 3-hour long movies are almost always too long to sit through.

[DLD]

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catego...emand_services