The upcoming mobile streamer Quibi has a strong presence at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.
Veena Sud (“The Killing,” “Seven Seconds”) and Kaitlin Olson (“It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia”) shared their positive experiences of Quibi at the Deadline Studio. Olsen stars with Will Forte in the comedy “Flipped.” Sud created, wrote and directed the Quibi thriller “The Stranger.”
“They gave us a whole bunch of money, which is always a positive,” Olson told the Deadline Studio. “It was a very funny script, and we got to have ownership. The fact that we got to be part of a brand new technology and platform was just exciting.”
Sud added that she was jazzed by the platform novel approach to storytelling — seven-to-10 minutes of content air at a time.
“What fascinated me about Quibi was the opportunity to create radically different content for a radically different platform, so it’s not just portable media,” said Sud to the Deadline Studio. “We live in the golden age of television and the screen as a presence in our lives. … Quibi affords artists to change the parameters of my their genre.”
Quibi, headed by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, will debut on April 6 with 175 original shows, as well as 8,500 quick bites of content.
Other streamers, including Hulu, Netflix, Amazon and Apple TV+, have had a strong presence at the festival in its opening days.