ideas

What’s a Quibi? A way to amuse yourself until you’re dead.

Quibi’s competitors are not Netflix and HBO so much as YouTube and Facebook, whose previous competitors were our imaginations and memories.

Quibi’s competitors are not Netflix and HBO so much as YouTube and Facebook, whose previous competitors were our imaginations and memories.

Quibi is a streaming service designed specifically for mobile phones. Scheduled to debut on April 6, it promises original dramatic series, comedies, news programs, reality shows and even full-length movies serialized into episodes of 10 minutes or less.
Laurence Fishburne, Bill Murray, Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro and Ridley Scott have all signed deals with the service, which has attracted more than $1 billion in funding from Hollywood studios and other investors.
This approach — to ironically acknowledge our worst impulses in hopes of justifying them — has become a recognizable strategy in contemporary advertising.