In one week, Quibi reported 1.7 million downloads. However, at this point it is still difficult to glimpse its success.
By Airy Nicole Contreras
The coronavirus pandemic has put the world's most powerful industries in check, including film. The machinery is paralyzed due to a health emergency that has already caused the temporary closure of movie theaters around the world and marked an unappealable stop to filming.
There is no certainty about when the new normal will come, or what will happen when we join it. Although there are projections about how much we will lose because of this crisis, uncertainty is latent. Against this backdrop, it is pressing to find new ways to keep finances away from the red zone. Reinvention is the word that should fill the thoughts of those who pull the strings of this business.
To all this we must add that, for a long time, a romance between Hollywood and Silicon Valley began to take shape, fueled by a fierce streaming war. In this context comes Quibi, which boasts of being disruptive, original and innovative.
What is Quibi? An app that offers high-quality audiovisual content – including movies, series, reality shows and television programs – of less than ten minutes, created to be consumed only on mobile devices. In addition, it allows you to adjust the image to the vertical, horizontal or both format, according to the user's preferences. In short, they are productions with the manufacture of Hollywood but in short format, with technology for a new form of storytelling. Its name comes from quick bite or taste: those bites of premium content that you can consume during transfers, in breaks of routine, in waiting rooms, and so on.
Even before knowing its particularities, the platform enjoyed great media attention, achieved largely thanks to the fact that its co-founders are two old sea lions. On the one hand we have Jeffrey Katzenberg, who was president of Production at Paramount Pictures, president of Walt Disney Animation Studios and co-founder of Dreamworks. On the other hand we have Meg Whitman, who was CEO and president of eBay and is now at the head of the Hewlett-Packard (HP) company.
With parents like these, it's no surprise that Quibi attracted, from both sides, investors of the caliber of Warner, NBC Universal, Disney, Alibaba Group, Google, PepsiCo, T-Mobile and Walmart, among others.
Katzenberg and Whitman's plan was to store an equivalent of nine months of programming before the official launch, but the global outbreak of covid-19 upended their plans. They knew they had a tool in their hands to "help, entertain and inspire people" in these uncertain times, so they decided to continue with the launch of the platform. After all, the time would be ideal, as users would have time and desire to experience new things during confinement.
If before the pandemic we invested a good part of our time in the cell phone, during the confinement it would become one of our main sources of entertainment. According to Comscore, in Mexico alone there are 66,798 million digital users, of which more than 45 percent browse through their mobile and 95 percent use only applications. In addition, we have an average consumption of 66 hours per month per user.
In one week, Quibi reported 1.7 million downloads. However, at this point it is still difficult to glimpse its success. First we will have to wait for the 90 days of free trial that it granted to its first subscribers (from now on it will only offer 14) and then count how many choose to be faithful to the app. Perhaps the secret of this fidelity lies in the experimentation of format-technology-content, and that this, in turn, provokes the interaction of the consumer to influence the narrative; or, in that it raises new consumer experiences, as will happen with Spielberg's After Dark, a series that can only be seen during midnight.
A factor that will not influence viewer loyalty, but will influence the success of the platform, will be its ability to collect and analyze data, a strategy proven by Netflix. Only time will reveal what possibilities a proposal like Quibi can open up in an industry that is preparing to face its own new normal.
*Airy Nicole. I devour movies and then distribute them. I have written about cinema in Milenio. I am head of Digital Cinema at Labodigital. I play the cello and make music for audiovisuals.
