Quibi: What Boomers Think Gen Z Wants
“Quick bites”. Quibi. You got it, right? Most don’t.
Somewhere in a chic Palo Alto standing-desk-only room was born this “forward-thinking” streaming service for the generation that’s constantly moving who needs something to do in that 10-minute void while waiting for a train or sitting on the loo avoiding your obligations at the office. Problem is, anyone who lives within a few hours of any major transit hub is quarantined in their home with hours (weeks, rather) to kill for the foreseeable future. But even if they weren’t, Quibi doesn’t have a place on their home screen. Or, more importantly for their Beverly Glen-based investors, their wallets.
Let’s start with the content. Sure, there’s some big names attached to it. Who hasn’t heard of Spielberg? A Chrissy Teigen courtroom drama with legally-binding decisions? You’ve intrigued me. But the big names can’t keep afloat the shallow story lines and limited breadth of the content. At CES you can tout innovative storytelling in a “ground-breaking” format to wow some upper-middle class socialites with a few dollars to spare, but that doesn’t satisfy the demands of the audience this is truly geared towards. These shows look like rip-offs. It’s trashy reality TV for a premium. Crissy’s Court plays out like an idea your friends from UCB pitched to CollegeHumor (unsuccessfully). Chance the Rapper and his Punk’d revival almost works, but it’s too brief: you can’t mess with someone in 10 minutes or less and expect their betrayal to feel as genuine as Miley and Khloe from the original. That takes a full 22 minutes. I’ll be watching the real Punk’d for free on Pluto TV. And why would you want to stop every 10 minutes in a movie to experience it as “chapters”? So your friend from some Silicon Valley fin-tech startup can serve me more ads?
The style of content has a place. It’s not on a subscription that costs nearly the same as Hulu, but on your friend’s TikTok or YouTube series where you can get a cheap (ahem, free) laugh and feel good about supporting their artistic endeavors. Why pay to fill that 10-minute void where you’re in a stall avoiding commitment? Scroll through those Insta stories for free instead of paying to watch Kaitlin Olson admirably attempt holding together a world around her that was never flushed out beyond a logline by some ex-Disney exec. And don’t get me started on him. Yeah, I’ve heard about that movie called The Lion King. But premium 2-hour animated family features from the 90s are very different from short-form social-oriented content for 2020 (as in can’t-share-screenshot social). I want Liza Koshy on my phone screen: if I want premium content I’ll go use my friend’s aunt’s login to access HBO, Netflix or one of the half-dozen other subscriptions I already have for a quality viewing experience.
I gave the trial a shot — 90 days is pretty generous. Now you don’t even need a trial — they’re uploading episodes directly to YouTube. The app itself feels lackluster. The UI doesn’t align properly between tabs. I can’t Chromecast (it was a planned feature from the beginning, they assure us). When people say television is evolving into an active medium, I don’t think they were referring to rotating your phone to see a poorly shot vertical feed. It’s trying to be social and generate water cooler conversations or Twitter rants, but won’t let us share screenshots and threatens to sue anyone who wants to start a podcast about them. It’s trying to fill a space that is ruled by user-generated content, and what their 60-year-old founders don’t seem to understand is that us in Gen-Z don’t want to pay for things. We have Spotify with ads. I can’t pay for an Adobe subscription because of crippling student debt and a workforce that’s evolving towards minimum-wage jobs and unpaid internships. Companies are competing to give away free subscriptions to us with their services (a la Quibi’s T-Mobile partnership). My friends and I have a shared Google Doc of all the logins we’re sharing, and the group chat mostly consists of everyone yelling at each other to log out so they can use Netflix while their Tinder date is over.
I had an old high school friend who freelanced in their LA office briefly, and he says the culture there was cultic. Everyone was busy obsessing over their leader and “visionary” that they mustn’t have time to create quality content. Everyone wants to say they’ve worked with Jeff Katzenberg, but their leadership is flocking post-launch. They have Seamless-style lunches. Oversized candy jars. Nitro brew. Their nearly $2 billion in funding must be going to that instead of fleshing out dialogue or realistic effects or a Roku app. A month into launch, I’m not convinced. One thing for sure, I’ll be going back to TikTok and I’m confident most of my generation will. It’s been atop the charts for nearly 2 years and doesn’t show any signs of becoming less relevant. I’m more than ok with Quibi nosediving out of the App Store and falling below an ASMR slicing app — I’ll take one of those, please.
