The Quirous Quase of Quibi

People’s attention spans are shortening, they said. People watch so much content on their phones, they said. People are hungry for content to enjoy on their longer and longer commute to work, they said. And they were right. So, who wouldn’t have bought into the idea of a streaming service that delivered high production-value shows with big ticket actors in the form of “Quick Bites?” Or, Quibi, for short. In early 2020, this was one of the most hyped and talk-about companies in Hollywood. They had veteran executives, cutting-edge technology, Chrissy Teigen, they had it all, and they were going to change the game!

And then they didn’t.

Yeah, so changing the game requires people to be playing your game. And if no one shows up to the field, it makes it pretty hard to be a change-agent. So why did Quibi make so much sense on paper, and then never get off the ground in the real world? In my unscientific, non-Hollywood veteran opinion, it’s because Quibi was targeting the wrong audience. Quibi was targeting people on a break from work, instead of using its platform to bring value to people at work. And once you understand a little more about microlearning, I think you might just agree that there’s still a future for Quibi in a billion dollar industry, it’s just not the industry you would have thought.

Let me start with a term, microlearning, because it’s a good starting point for my revelation about Quibi. Microlearning is somewhat of a catchall term for training or lesson plans that are, as you’d expect, short. Think of microlearning as the polar opposite of cramming. Instead of ingesting vast amounts of material all at once and expecting understanding and implementation of all concepts, a microlearning environment chunks information into small amounts, usually one idea at a time.

L&D professionals have come to favor microlearning programs because employees engage with the content of shorter, on-demand courses 50% more, on average, than traditional development courses. Makes sense, since you can pull up a quick training video on a laptop or phone, learn the information you need for a current project, and then get back to it after a few minutes. Because no one wants to spend 2 full days at a conference that HR forces them to attend when all they really needed was a 5 minute lesson on a very specific challenge. Or, at least that’s what they remember most from the conference. A major problem is that even if you’re trying to remember all the important points from back-to-back-to-back training sessions, our human brains just can’t hold onto that much knowledge at once.

In this sense, the work environment lends itself to microlearning really well. And once you think about it, the idea of forcing people to binge-consume content for work doesn’t make sense. And speaking of binging, let’s get back to Quibi...

There are going to be way more in-depth case-studies about Quibi in business schools than I'm giving here. But here are the basics: Quibi was a streaming service that promised to revolutionize the entertainment industry because it sought to meet their audience where they were clearly at, on their phones, for a few minutes at a time. The entire platform was made up of episodes of all different genres, but no episode ran longer than 10 minutes. There was even a 60 minutes news program off-shoot, which, oddly, was still called 60 minutes, but I guess just calling it 10 minutes was too out of context.

Anyway, everyone seemed excited for the platform to get up and running, but looking back, it’s hard to say that Quibi had a meteoric rise and fall, because they never really got to the rise part. Most users of the platform signed up for 3-months of free content, and then there was a giant drop-off once that first bill showed up. You know, that part of the plan where Quibi would actually start making money. And listen, I could spend all my time talking about how this was all COVID’s fault, and there's at least an argument, albeit a bit biased, for that. But Netflix sure wasn’t hurting in 2020. And that’s how I arrived at my theory of Quibi trying going after the wrong audience, or really the right audience, but in the wrong context.

Quibi was trying to create a microlearning, or microviewing environment for entertainment. What it failed to realize was that for streaming services, people want to want to binge-watch. People want to watch the entire season of Stranger Things in one go, because they’re so involved in the story! People chose to re-watch all the hour-long episodes of Game of Thrones leading up the final season. My sister saw Titanic, a 3 hour movie, in theaters 5 times! 5! That is a true story and you can fact check that! With entertainment, people love getting wrapped up for hours on end! But Quibi seemed to say, “Listen, we know you’re not going to watch this show for more than a few minutes at a time.” They were technically right. Most viewers watched Quibi’s shows for less than a few minutes. The issue was that they didn't keep watching.

But here’s my billion dollar idea! I think Quibi’s platform and technology has a future! Just not in entertainment. If Quibi were a platform which included a library of content for people development, broken down into bite-sized lessons, then I believe the product and user would match up perfectly! Because so often the people we are trying to teach or train are not ready for all the information we’re trying to give them. But, if we could deliver our training in Quick Bites, and clients chose when and where they accessed those lessons, then engagement and retention could go through the roof!

Something still tells me that even at a steep discount buying Quibi’s platform might be a little out of my price range right now, so let’s at least take a lesson from Quibi if not the technology. If you’re trying to entertain, you might be able to succeed with shorter clips and content, but if your content is good, your audience will ask for longer form content, not shorter. But, if you’re trying to teach, then Quick Bites are where it’s at. Short, easy to digest nuggets of practical information.

So I guess in some sense, I’m suggesting you take a page out of the Quibi playbook.

Just make sure it’s the right page because there’s a lot of questionable stuff in there too.