If Netflix had to come up with a dream business scenario, it would probably involve people being confined to their homes for months at a time.

Worldwide lockdowns have certainly been good for business, and in its first-quarter report for 2020, Netflix revealed that it has added a whopping 15,77 million new subscribers worldwide.

Yes, Tiger King would have played a role in that, and soo too did Love Is Blind, proving that trash TV reigns supreme.

You might think this is the ideal time, then, to launch a rival streaming service, but things aren’t working out so well for Quibi.

Over to CNN:

The streaming service, which offers mobile videos and series that are cut into segments shorter than 10 minutes, garnered a lot of attention when it launched on April 6. But the payoff has been muted, and the service’s growth is anemic.

Jeffrey Katzenberg, Quibi’s founder, told the New York Times on Monday that he attributes “everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus… But we own it.”

…”Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?” he said. “The answer is no. It’s not up to what we wanted. It’s not close to what we wanted.”

Wow, I guess our faith in the human attention span has plummeted to such a level that we now splice series into segments under 10 minutes.

Where does it end? Will we eventually watch entire movies in a series of TikTok videos? Or, as Something About Mary predicted years ago, seven-minute abs.

Back to Quibi, and Meg Whitman, the company’s CEO, who is more optimistic than Katzenberg:

“You have to remember, we’re a new brand with original content, a new tech platform that was built from the ground up,” Whitman said. “We came to market with no library, no legacy product and we’re starting from scratch.”

Quibi has roughly 1.3 million active users — a tiny base compared to more than 50 million Disney+ customers and 183 million Netflix users. And most of Quibi’s customers are in the 90-day free trial period. Afterward, the service costs $4.99 a month with ads, and $7.99 a month without.

At present, Quibi is available only in the United States and Canada.

That bit about most users being in the free trial period is the real kicker, and the company knows it can expect a big drop-off when users reach that end point.

Whilst it’s true that both Netflix and Hulu experienced slow growth to start, none of them launched in the midst of a global pandemic, with people cooped up indoors and desperate for entertainment.

Quibi was essentially designed for those on the move, who just want to grab a shorter video whilst commuting, for example, but analysts aren’t certain it will ever take off:

So to say it’s been a rough start is an understatement, but it’s unclear if Quibi is suffering from the pandemic or if it’s suffering from being Quibi, according to [Michael Goodman, director of TV and media strategies at Strategy Analytics].

“Quibi is the outlier in this pandemic among streaming services because other services have seen a boom lately. So is this a product that consumers actually want? That’s the question right now,” he said. “Time will tell if they can turn it around, and we might not know until the pandemic ends, but I believe they have a really difficult road ahead of them.”

Whitman remains optimistic, saying that “when we get to the other side of the pandemic, we’ll see some accelerating growth”.

That could happen, but the service could also crash and burn, as the initial cash raised dwindles.

I think I’ll stick to watching full episodes of series, thanks.

[source:cnn]