Quibi, which was started by DreamWorks founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, has named Tom Conrad — the former Co-Founder and CTO of Pandora as their Chief Product Officer. Conrad, who most recently was the VP of Product at Snapchat, joins the highly funded start-up which has raised over $1B before launch.
Quibi (short for quick bites) will focus on high-quality short form content that is designed to be watched on your smartphone. The serialized content will be 10-20 minutes in length and have some powerful storytellers behind them.
One of the most buzzed about shows is called ‘Frat Boy Genius’, which tells the story of how Snapchat’s Founder, Evan Spiegel, created “one of the great social platforms of our time,” shared Katzenberg. “And we want to tell a story that is as compelling and interesting about the creation of Snapchat and Evan’s story as ‘The Social Network’ was for Facebook.”
The goal is not to compete with Netflix, but to capture share of the mobile video audience that generally migrates to YouTube. In discussing the growth of mobile video, Katzenberg highlighted “Six years ago it was six minutes. A year and a half ago, it was 40 minutes. And today it’s 70 minutes. People love being able to watch great short form content on the go.”
It is expected that the Quibi will mimic Hulu’s pricing strategy, with a lower priced subscription with ads and higher priced no commercial plan. You will have to wait a bit though for the service, as it’s not scheduled to launch until late 2019.