There’s a new streaming service in town – Quibi – and this one has the backing of one of Hollywood’s biggest executives.
The streaming service destined to launch next April was created by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of DreamWorks Animation and longtime Disney executive.
According to Katzenberg, the idea for the streaming service came from Dan Brown’s ‘The Da Vinci Code’ with more than 100 chapters each averaging just 5-pages each.
The idea being that Quibi will serve up content in no more than 10-minute increments, and only then on smartphones.
“We created a new platform for on-the-go viewing able to (attract) a hard-to-reach audience,” Quibi CEO Meg Whitman explained at a recent conference in Los Angeles.
“Millennials, that’s our target audience.”

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman
So far the service has received more than US$1 billion in funding from major Hollywood studios, including Steven Spielberg, Guillermo Del Toro and Jennifer Lopez.
According to Whitman, Quibi stands for ‘quick bites’ and will offer Hollywood-quality videos in short form and exclusively made for the platform.
“Everything is being optimised for mobile, whether it’s how the content is shot, how we render it,” she said.
“We’re telling stories in chapters,” she said, going on to explain that one of the core features of the service will be long-form content broken down into 10-minute increments.
“The best analogy I have for you in another medium is ‘The Da Vinci Code,'” she said. “The book is 464 pages and every chapter is five pages long because Dan Brown said people didn’t want to read for 40 minutes at a time anymore.”
According to Whitman, the serialised format will be key in attracting the platform’s target audience of younger viewers.
