Does watching 10-minute-or-less episodes of new stuff on your phone during, say, a public transportation commute to work or a workout at the gym sound appealing to you? Jeffrey Katzenberg hoped so. But when his new streaming platform Quibi launched last week with relatively underwhelming feedback and numbers, a new reality emerged: In a world where folks are stuck at home during the coronavirus pandemic, we’re kinda not allowed to do any of those on-the-go things where quick mobile bites might come in handy. Instead, we tend to be indulging in delicious TV time. And so, abandoning their initial premise of conception, Quibi’s CEO Meg Whitman has promised to CNBC that a “watch on TV” option is coming sooner than we think.
Image via Quibi
When asked about plans to stream Quibi content on TVs or non-mobile devices, Whitman said during her taped-from-home interview (which experienced some adorably relatable “Zoom call technical difficulties”) that “We thought about that upfront, but we really wanted to get that right for mobile. But now the current situation, we’re talking to the engineering team about — We had always planned to be able to cast to your TV, so we’re gonna see if we can accelerate that in the engineering roadmap. So we’ll eventually get there, but it was never part of the launch.” While Whitman didn’t give any specifics on when such streaming options would be available, her comments do seem to admit that the coronavirus has dampened the appeal of a mobile-only content streaming platform, and that the eventual desire for a “Quibi Premium” of sorts was always built into their plans (and will likely cost us more money to subscribe to).
Whitman was also there to defend Quibi’s numbers — she touted the service as having “1.7 million downloads in its first week,” insisted that the coronavirus pandemic did not affect their business despite their “on the go” branding, boasted about their status as the “most successful app debut of a new brand,” and said that “80% of people who have started a show watch it through the first episode.” In comparison to something like a Disney+, which boasted 10 million subscribers after its first day, this is not the most promising news. But for a service like Quibi which has no brand name recognition and is instead relying on its star power to get the word out (a factor I’m not sure matters to the mobile-friendly Gen-Z consumers they’re targeting, used to their own stratosphere of TikTok and Twitch stars), it’s perhaps enough to stay hopeful. And once they let folks watch their stuff on TV, maybe those numbers will raise even higher. And maybe — just maybe — they’ll let us watch their segmented movies all strung together in a row. Aka… a normal movie. We can dream, right?
For more on all things Quibi, here’s an example of the worst the service has to offer, and the best.
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April 14, 2020 at 05:58AM
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You Can Watch Quibi on a TV or Computer Soon, Not Just Phones - Collider.com
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