Hollywood, it seems, has been fighting fires for more than a decade. Long before it faced a pandemic and widespread strikes, streaming and digital content were bleeding it dry. In January 2020, former WIRED writer Adam Rogers wrote about a visit to an industry under siege. In "Hollywood Bets On a Future of Quick Clips and Tiny Screens ," he details how some of the best and brightest in film and TV went all-in on what they hoped would strike back: Quibi, short for "quick bits." Helmed by Disney's Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman of eBay and HP, the company planned to deliver a platform hosting short-form video produced with an A-list budget. For a brief period of time, the highly-researched gamble was, as Rogers said, "What Hollywood Is Talking About Now." Then came Covid-19. Rogers' story is interesting in 2024 in part because it's fascinating to gawk at the sheer scale of the resources put into a platform (or was it a studio?) that ultimately survived just eight months. Of the more recent ventures between Silicon Valley and Hollywood, few to none have failed as spectacularly as Quibi did.
Lately, TikTokkers have started doing what Quibi wanted to do, with all its millions of dollars. Users post five-minute bits of existing TV shows and movies, in succession, so that viewers can essentially watch an entire program by scrolling through these short videos. (Copyright issues abound.) Last November, a new TV series helmed by Don't Look Up's Adam McKay premiered using this very format. For this reason, I wonder whether Quibi was really on to something, and failed as simply a casualty of the pandemic. (Katzenberg later told The New York Times , "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything.") Or did its founders gravely misjudge the way people want to engage with television? After all, only about half of my twentysomething friends are even on TikTok at all, and they all prefer to watch TV on, well, a TV.
As of yet, no one has picked up where Quibi left off. The question remains whether viewers, with their screen addictions and ever-shortening attention spans, want on-the-go, professional storytelling in highly-produced, 10-minute bursts as opposed to keeping their scroll sessions on Instagram and TikTok separate from their evenings on the couch with HBO. To me, Quibi is proof of how much money and resources exist among the upper echelon of producers and tech execs, even when budgets are supposedly tight. In Rogers' story, funders essentially fling cash at the enterprise. It's also a reminder that consumers are really hard to figure out. What do you think? Where is entertainment going next? Is its future really on the phone screen? Let me know in the comments below the story or email me at samantha_spengler@wired.com.
See you next weekend.
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