‘Frat Boy Genius’ Based on Founding of Snapchat Coming to Katzenberg’s Streaming Service Quibi
At SXSW, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman unveiled some of the shows coming to their short-form streaming service Quibi, as originally reported by TechCrunch.
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.”
Quibi also announced an original show based on Telemundo hit show ‘El Señor de los Cielos’, as well as a music competition show created and hosted by Justin Bieber’s manager Scooter Braun. The company had already announced that Filmmakers Sam Raimi (Spiderman), Guillermo del Toro (The Shape of Water), and Antoine Fuqua (The Magnificent Seven) are all developing series for Quibi.
Quibi which was started by DreamWorks founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and former eBay CEO, Meg Whitman, 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.
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.