Unless the time travel inherent in the printed page allows for some late-game turnaround, I think we can agree that the launch of Quibi - the new video entertainment platform - has not been a success. If you aren’t in the loop, Quibi is the brainchild of power player Jeffrey Katzenberg and used a cool two billion dollars to reach for the future of video storytelling. Its core idea is to serve up stories in seven-toten-minute chunks (“quick bites”, or “quibis”) exclusively to phones.
As someone whose biggest success was a phone game that told its story with 270 tiny bites of video, I was bullish on this one. Having now tried out the new service, less so. Why did Quibi fail? I don’t blame the pandemic (yes, this isn’t the world Quibi was designed for, but it’s a world that is hungry for entertainment) but the platform’s failure to understand the leap it was promising. A leap that videogames took a long time ago.