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Apple Has No Interest in Purchasing Failing Short-Form Video Streaming Service Quibi
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LOL. Of course some troll has a patent on horizontal/vertical video. So many patents are awarded to stupid things. Maybe I should see if I can patent stupidity.
BREAKING: Apple Has No Interest in Purchasing <enter name of failing business do to idiotic business model>
Anyone who wants to watch short-form video content on their mobile device is using TikTok to do so. Don't know why Quibi is even a thing.
Quibi is one of those things that seem like people sitting around a table while drinking wrote down an idea on a napkin with five minutes thought and some idiot investor threw a billion dollars at it because he trusted the leaders. But who in their right mind wold give any credibility to Meg Whitman or any of the others whose names slipped my mind?
Apple TV+ is distinguished by an obsessive focus on producing industry-leading quality over quantity. It aligns perfectly with Apple's brand strategy. Quibi would be a match made in hell for Apple, IMO.
I’d simplify even further to:
No One Has Interest in Purchasing Quibi, Because It Was a Stupid Idea
Seriously, how anybody thought this was going to work, much less to the point you’d invest a billion dollars in it, is a mystery to me.
Sure, short-form content can work. There are anime series with 5-10 minute episodes. There are well-produced comedy shorts all over YouTube, and SNL and similar sketch comedy series have been doing short-form standalone content successfully for decades. There are standalone and serial live action things that work, too.
But spending vastly too much on the production, then throwing up a stiff paywall and pinning it to mobile only is just asking for failure.
Yeah, but you’re forgetting that quibi supports portrait mode or something. Genius.
Quibi as a standalone service is terrible, starting with that dumb name. As a part of tv+ and tightly integrated into iOS, it has potential.
The shows and star talent they've managed to assemble are actually quite good. As shows on tv+, it would be good value. Want to catch up on shows on your iPhone? Those same shows work well in portrait mode.
What's best is that they've had so few subscribers that a lot of these shows sitting on the service have never been seen by millions of existing and future tv+ viewers. They could reboot the series and restart rolling out the shows a few at a time, a good compliment to all the other shows Apple is already rolling out.
The shows and star talent they've managed to assemble are actually quite good. As shows on tv+, it would be good value. Want to catch up on shows on your iPhone? Those same shows work well in portrait mode.
What's best is that they've had so few subscribers that a lot of these shows sitting on the service have never been seen by millions of existing and future tv+ viewers. They could reboot the series and restart rolling out the shows a few at a time, a good compliment to all the other shows Apple is already rolling out.
Except that the contracts with the content creators are such that apple wouldn’t own the content it is paying for for very long, and wouldn’t be able to generate a catalog.
Not worth it.
- Spend a billion dollars making 5-minute portrait-orientation chunks of TV shows.
- ???
- Profit!
Hundreds of millions of users.
In short form.
It’s just that they do it on free services (Instagram, Snapchat and TikTok...).
Long form maybe but I think for this kind of short form he has a point. This kind of content is perfect for when you don’t have much time, say when you are on a short bus or train ride to work or when you have 5 mins downtime between meetings etc
I hate when shows end too early and their entire business model is making shows that end too early. I’m not surprised at this. That and it being mobile only is obnoxious. The fact that you can’t even access your account on their website makes no sense.
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Pause and resume works wonders. There’s no need for truncated stories.
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Yes, I’ve often complained that each episode of the sopranos and breaking bad should be 5 minutes or less so that I can watch them while riding elevators.
/s
I realize a lot of people’s days are not like mine, but if I were the kind of person who wanted to watch a video in the 5 minute downtime between meetings, I’d be far more able to now, in the short gaps between an seemingly-endless conference calls and Zoom meetings, since nobody can see me goofing around on my phone or hear what I’m watching.
I think the bigger question is how many people are willing to pay $5 a month for that, especially if what you’re getting content-wise isn’t appreciably different than pausing a 20-minute show at the commercial break.
Sarcasm? Why would people watch videos on a tiny mobile screen if they’re “stuck inside their homes” where they can watch content on their... y’know.... TV?
You would think that would be the case, but my observation is that this is very much not sarcasm. My wife has full control of the TV, is sitting on the couch in the same position she watches TV from, and still frequently watches stuff on her phone. Even I find myself doing that on occasion, and I much more often watch YouTube on a laptop instead of the 70” TV across the room even when I don’t have any technical reason to.
Many of my younger co-workers seem to prefer watching stuff on their phones to the TV even when the opportunity is available. Even more so for kids (although they are not the target market here as far as I can tell)--when I was a kid if you were lucky you had a TV in your room. Now you have your phone in your room.
Not to mention that if you have, say, four family members or three roommates in a house and only one TV, six months into social distancing they’re probably all just huddled in a corner watching their own thing on their own phone.
None of which directly relates to this product, since it has an even narrower market than just “watch on small screen”, which could have been genuinely hurt by the pandemic even if it was a dumb idea to start with (or at least dumb to dump a billion dollars into content to start with). Just that it seems an increasing number of people are perfectly happy to watch video on a 6” screen even if they have a big-screen TV sitting in front of them that can display the same content.
(Which, to be absolutely fair as far as screen size goes, the angle of view on that 6” screen held at arm’s length might well be similar to the angle of view on the TV across the room, so it’s not entirely as stupid as it sounds.)