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If you want any more reasons to think HN is stupid look at they way they think they knew better the whole time about Quibi in this and other threads. I'd like

If you want any more reasons to think HN is stupid look at they way they think they knew better the whole time about Quibi in this and other threads. I'd like to see who actually wrote it down and explained why it wouldn't work before it failed. Quibi is brilliant. Short form TV will take a huge market share. Quibi failed due to a content issue. This is hard. It takes a lot of money and a long time to pull this off. Pre-existing content is rarer. It's possible short form TV will come into play first going through places like Netflix. But if you wanted to own the market this was an ok attempt. And yes forcing people to use phones and having different views was wrong. People want to be on a couch and passively watching TV but next week everyone on HN believes in VR. HN has no idea of the world and IT.

majormajor 6y ago
> It's possible short form TV will come into play first going through places like Netflix. But if you wanted to own the market this was an ok attempt. One of the reasons many people doubted Quibi is because short-form content is something Netflix and Hulu have already experimented with. The idea is like crack to product folks - habit forming! make the user get used to opening up the app every day! - but nobody has ever really made it stick for Hollywood-style or even just "a bit more premium than Youtube" content that requires a subscription. Quibi to me looked like "Vessel/Go90, but with spending way more money" and that was a dubious proposition. (And this was said by many people in threads before Quibi even launched, so...)
jcranmer 6y ago
Well, as I pointed out in yesterday's Quibi thread, short-form content absolutely predates Quibi. Where Quibi went wrong is in its focus on producing short-form content by chopping long-form content into small pieces instead of adapting narratives to work in short-form content. And you also point out yourself that every idea Quibi had that differentiated itself from other streaming services (save the short-form content) didn't work. It's hard to call it brilliant if every original idea it had wasn't a good one...
- aaron695 6y ago
  > chopping long-form content into small pieces I've watched most of the fiction. This is not true. It was all designed for short form. They knew this - "“What you can’t do is take an hour-long TV show and chop it up… it has to be written and shot for this use case,” said (Quibi CEO Meg Whitman. “If we are successful, there will be plenty of competition. We will have accumulated a library [of content] that they can’t go buy.” Their mistake is hard to exactly call. It is definitely minutes of entertainment available though. I think you need to get short form TV to the same pricing model as TV movies then dump a lot of money into a library. A idea I think would be to try and get more length, like 3 hours rather than 90 mins. So you make "TV movies" (Obviously learn to script and shoot for short form) that are 3 hours long that cost less than double the cost. Viewers can binge on a special night. Their can go to bed no problem, so no pressure a long movie gives you (The Irishman). It's relaxing. It feels like value.

majormajor 6y ago

> It's possible short form TV will come into play first going through places like Netflix. But if you wanted to own the market this was an ok attempt. One of the reasons many people doubted Quibi is because short-form content is something Netflix and Hulu have already experimented with. The idea is like crack to product folks - habit forming! make the user get used to opening up the app every day! - but nobody has ever really made it stick for Hollywood-style or even just "a bit more premium than Youtube" content that requires a subscription. Quibi to me looked like "Vessel/Go90, but with spending way more money" and that was a dubious proposition. (And this was said by many people in threads before Quibi even launched, so...)

jcranmer 6y ago

Well, as I pointed out in yesterday's Quibi thread, short-form content absolutely predates Quibi. Where Quibi went wrong is in its focus on producing short-form content by chopping long-form content into small pieces instead of adapting narratives to work in short-form content. And you also point out yourself that every idea Quibi had that differentiated itself from other streaming services (save the short-form content) didn't work. It's hard to call it brilliant if every original idea it had wasn't a good one...

aaron695 6y ago
> chopping long-form content into small pieces I've watched most of the fiction. This is not true. It was all designed for short form. They knew this - "“What you can’t do is take an hour-long TV show and chop it up… it has to be written and shot for this use case,” said (Quibi CEO Meg Whitman. “If we are successful, there will be plenty of competition. We will have accumulated a library [of content] that they can’t go buy.” Their mistake is hard to exactly call. It is definitely minutes of entertainment available though. I think you need to get short form TV to the same pricing model as TV movies then dump a lot of money into a library. A idea I think would be to try and get more length, like 3 hours rather than 90 mins. So you make "TV movies" (Obviously learn to script and shoot for short form) that are 3 hours long that cost less than double the cost. Viewers can binge on a special night. Their can go to bed no problem, so no pressure a long movie gives you (The Irishman). It's relaxing. It feels like value.