I waited a few days to see what people are talking about Quibi before I decided to write this. It was not a surprise when this article was published, the domino effect happened.
This is a Product Manager’s perspective on why it’s not late for Quibi to deliver to their promises. Why it’s okay to make mistakes and learn from them as everyone does. Why you as a reader should be responsible to have unbiased thoughts in any team that is trying to bring a change.
What exactly is Quibi?
In short, Quibi (Quick Bites) is a short video streaming service that is mobile-only, and one of the first to deliver content with Turnstyle technology.
What is Turnstyle technology?
When you are watching any content on popular streaming services, the content is created with a single perspective for the audience. Turnstyle technology is a new way of engaging the audience with the content. Unlike any other device, a mobile device has a landscape and a portrait mode. Turnstyle technology takes advantage of these differences and gives you two different perspectives while watching the same content. When you are on the landscape mode, you may be watching the girl walking with her phone in her hand from 5 feet away in a wide-angle shot, but when you change your phone to portrait mode, the shot immediately changes to the view from her phone’s front camera so you are seeing that girl’s face in close-up and the true emotions she is expressing.
This is not possible on TVs as of now, this is the very reason Quibi is a “mobile-only” streaming platform. And, being a Product Manager, I totally support the “short” video format (10 min or less) because it’s hard to create content for the Turnstyle technology. The amount of resources and equipment that are needed to make a full-fledged movie is not pragmatic for this new format.
Prior to the launch of Quibi
Prior to April 6, 2020, when Quibi was about to launch, people were writing about how awesome the platform is going to be and the list of actors and directors who have been on Quibi’s list made it promising.
To put it in perspective, here are some of the articles written until Mid April,
1. Quibi Should Not Be Ignored — Mike Raab
2. No One Aasked For Quibi, But It’s Kind Of Great — JAKE KLEINMAN
3. Quibi had 1.7 million downloads in its first week, is working on TV casting support — Chris Welch, The Verge
It’s not a surprise to me that Quibi grabbed the attention of the giants like Techcrunch, The Verge, and so on even before it’s launch. Because of the $$$ behind the team, the team itself, and the A+ talent cast crew that the founder managed to get on board with his vision.
Here is where Quibi had failed
I am not denying the fact that Quibi has underperformed to the expectations.
Marketing Blunder
I am going to be brutal here. I am a 27 years old tech person in the Boston area, and I didn’t fully understand what Quibi was all about even from the constant advertisements they made me watch while trying to play any video on YouTube. It didn’t create a curiosity for me to even go to their website to check. I thought it was just me, but no. I asked my girlfriend, my housemates, my cousins who live in the states, my friends who graduated with me. Everyone’s answer to Quibi was
“Oh, that Netflix competitor?” or “Oh, that short series platform?” and similar. A marketing expert would know how important it is to market the product with the vision of the product in mind. “Quick Bites” is an abbreviation of Quibi, but it was hard for most to understand why they built what they built.
You have literally 5 seconds to grab the user’s attention, else they skip. Quibi being Quick Bites as the tagline, could have tried to be creative to have made it effective within those 5 seconds. But no.
Content Moderation
I agree to a certain degree that Quibi didn’t choose the right personnel to create content for the right audience they where marketing to. There is some validity in that. Here are my questions,
- Would the new non-popular cast crew get the attention that they got right now? — No
- Would newer producers and directors have the experience to think of creating content for Turnstyle technology? — Maybe not
- Would they have gotten the $1.8bn investment that they received if not for the above two reasons? — I don’t think so
And mocking Reno 911 not enticing the millennials because many of them were not even grown enough to have watched the show is obsolete. I didn’t watch Friends until I moved to the states in 2016. Many of my friends didn’t watch some of the epics until their friends motivated them to. We don’t watch a show because we were born during those times, we watch it for two reasons, it’s either because all our friends/everyone around us are watching it, or we liked the artist from a different show and we liked their screen presence. Ozark for example.
Yes, they could have had some shows from the famous YouTube influencers. But that will be a risky move. If they didn’t make good content (which many youtube influencers don’t), it will turn those millions of fans to roast the platform considering this is a new technology and not yet another streaming service. You would rather trust Steven Spielberg than PewDiePie to bring paid subscribers on a brand new platform which is visioned to be a complete disruptor.
A simple example is the timing of Spotify getting Joe Rogen on board for an exclusive podcast. They didn’t do it when they started supporting podcasts on the platform, they did it only after they hit the product-market fit and a significant increase in podcast listeners on the platform. And we all saw what it did to Spotify’s stock price.
Finally, timing
For good or bad, the timing of the launch was not right. But, one thing this pandemic has shown is, expect the unexpected.
When Fox News prematurely celebrated Texas, Florida's state opening in the midst of the pandemic is now turning its back on those governors.
Quibi’s hypothesis on people’s screen time being proportional to them watching content on Quibi still holds true. More people have started watching YouTube videos in recent times. Netflix added 15 million subscribers during the Pandemic. Disney Plus added 40+ million subscribers within a few days of its launch, so parents can add to the cognitive issues their kids could face in the long term just so they could focus on their Zoom meetings.
Quibi’s timing is nearly perfect, but the perplexing marketing and content moderation didn’t deliver the vision of the product to its audience efficiently.
Why Quibi in my opinion still holds the chance?
Two simple reasons,
- It’s a tech company, which means it can adapt and pivot.
- It already has the hype that many other tech companies dream for. Any small move they make has the potential to go wild on the internet.
Conclusion
Slidebean’s CEO, Caya in his YouTube channel once posted a video about the mistakes he had made that almost crashed the company. And, experiments followed by learning from mistakes quickly made Slidebean come out of the failure. Now they have achieved a product-market fit in their niche and pandemic is not impacting them because they provide true value to their users.
This is true for any disruptive company that is successful today. Apple, Amazon, Compaq, to name a few. Tesla is a great example of having a tough start, but we know where they stand now. It’s disappointing when writers write content without analyzing from the creator’s perspective but following the trends blindly. When did we lose the ability to put ourselves in other’s shoes?
