Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said Monday that the coronavirus is the sole reason the streaming service has had such an anemic start.
“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg told The New York Times. “Everything. But we own it.”
That’s a broad statement for a service that was iffy to begin with. Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman rolled Quibi out at CES in January, leaning on their celebrity friends and a $1.8 billion cash raise to produce short content that was meant to be watched by people who were on the go.
It launched April 6, right about the time people’s lives got a lot less mobile. Signups never took off, even with a 90-day free trial. Only between 3 and 3.5 million people have installed the app. The number of active users is about a third of that, the company said.
“Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?” he said. “The answer is no. It’s not up to what we wanted. It’s not close to what we wanted.”
Early on, Katzenberg and Whitman were adamant that Quibi’s content would not work on TV screens. It was designed for a mobile audience and the viewing habits of those people. Now, however, the company is adjusting content like Chrissy’s Court to fit on TV screens. (iPhone users can stream content to the TVs now. Android subscribers will be able to in the coming weeks.)
Despite his insistence that coronavirus was the exclusive reason for the service’s troubles, Katzenberg admitted that some content had failed to connect with audiences. News programming, for instance, from NBC, BBC, ESPN, and others, which was classified “Daily Essentials” has gone largely unwatched.
“The Daily Essentials are not that essential,” said Katzenberg.
Quibi had projected it would gather 7 million viewers in its first year. The company has now abandoned that guidance but has not given any updated projections.
China just gave Hollywood a cautionary tale about AI filmmaking. Sanxingdui: Future Past, billed as the country's first fully AI-generated movie, hit theaters on October 23 and bombed at the box office.
According to Futurism, the film's reported $1.5 million production budget landed on more than 10,000 screens. Yet it pulled in only about $181,000, averaging roughly $20 per screen, making the budget difficult to recover.
Some of the best shots in Grok Imagine’s AI-made Odyssey don’t contain actors. Ancient landscapes stretch into the distance. Close-ups of grimy hands suggest people who have touched something rougher than a keyboard. For a few seconds, the illusion holds.
https://twitter.com/imagine/status/2113712964419063911
YouTube videos could soon look better without eating quite so much data, right? Thankfully, the platform plans to introduce a new video format called AV2 on its web player in early 2027, promising more efficient streaming and potentially fewer playback hiccups on slower internet connections. The big headline is a roughly 30% improvement in compression efficiency over AV1, YouTube's existing video format. That doesn't guarantee every video will use 30% less data, but it could make streaming a little easier on both internet connections and data allowances.
What is AV2, and why should viewers care?