hat is a Quibi? A vague unit of ten minutes or less, we’re told in the many ads now ubiquitous (and much maligned) on YouTube, Instagram and TV. A billionaire-backed attempt to mint a new one-word signature in entertainment, to unite Hollywood prestige and resources with the interstitial, “snackable” bumps of content popularized by lo-fi creators on video platforms and social media networks. More cynically, a deep-pocketed swing to monetize our last shreds of attention with an ironic wink (we’re all on our phones anyway), a way to amuse ourselves until we die. Either way, with a staggering $1.75bn in funding before its launch this week, Quibi is swinging big on one central question: can it change the nature of streaming? The company, conceived by Hollywood legend Jeffrey Katzenberg and executed by former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, seems confident it can. Despite a saturated but still growing market of streaming services – titans Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime and HBO and relative newcomers Disney +, Apple TV+, CBS AllAccess, the list could go on – Quibi sees a potentially rich corner in mobile-specific content diced into seven to 10 “quick bites” (qui-bi, get it?). Which means it’s competing less with the full-length streamers than with Facebook, YouTube and TikTok – frenetic, lucrative factories of distraction and amusement for the snippets of time formerly reserved for your ambient mind. It’s perhaps a bit weird that this new service, aimed to be the disruptive insurgent of entertainment platforms and specifically conceived for younger audiences born with phones in their hands, emerges from the depths of Hollywood and the Silicon Valley establishment. Katzenberg, 69, was once chairman of Walt Disney Studios (1984 to 1994) and co-founded DreamWorks Animation, where he was the long-time CEO; Whitman, 63, was CEO of eBay as it mushroomed into a billion-dollar online marketplace, and was later CEO of Hewlett-Packard from 2011-2017 (she also unsuccessfully ran for governor of California as a Republican in 2010). Both are billionaires, with the connections and wealth to pay for an army of prestige and/or popular talent, and the cache to sell their attention experiment as revolutionary and informed. Its advertising partners out of the gate include such business heavyweights as Google, Anheuser-Busch, Walmart, PepsiCo and Procter & Gamble. Thus Quibi’s $1.75bn in funding to date has recruited a truly who’s who list of contributors which, in press materials and ads, blurs together in peak 2020 maximalist, chaotic fashion. Shows feature a call-sheet of such generationally varied stars as Joe Jonas, Idris Elba, Sophie Turner, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper, LeBron James, Jennifer Lopez, Reese Witherspoon, Liam Hemsworth, Christoph Waltz, Lena Waithe, Nicole Richie, Demi Lovato, Will Smith, Laura Dern, Kevin Hart, Tyra Banks, Zac Efron, Bill Murray and Laurence Fishburne. A-list creators including Steven Speilberg, Guillermo del Toro, Ridley Scott, Antoine Fuqua, Catherine Hardwicke and Sam Raimi have produced or directed shows exclusively for the service. Quibi has patented a new filmmaking technology, Turnstyle, which I’m sure is very complicated to engineer but essentially means you can shift your viewing from portrait mode to landscape and back seamlessly. And whereas other streaming giants have amassed or purchased their libraries of original or licensed content over time, Quibi will launch with a tsunami of homegrown shows. The service begins with three episodes each of its first 50 titles, and will roll out 25 episodes (or, as it calls it in a press release, “three hours of fresh, original, premium content”) every weekday afterward. All told, it’s planning to release 175 original shows in its first year, which translates into 8,500 “quibis” of content. The service has delineated its hulk of productions into three categories: Movies in Chapters, which will tell feature or season-length stories in seven to 10 minute bits; Unscripted and Docs, perhaps its most promising category given its persona power (internet star Chrissy Teigen being herself, but as Judge Judy!) and alignment with the most successful house style of YouTube; and Daily Essentials, five to six minute news updates from such established houses as the BBC, NBC News, The Weather Channel, Telemundo and ESPN (also: Rotten Tomatoes, TMZ, and “Trailers by Fandango”). Quibi launches with a free 90-day trial – far more time than competitors Netflix and Amazon Prime (30 days) or Apple TV+ or Hulu/Disney+ (7 days). A monthly subscription will cost $4.99 with ads and $7.99 without ads, for which customers can view a true scattershot of content, from the aforementioned Chrissy’s Court, to Chance the Rapper’s reboot of MTV’s Punk’d, to Sophie Turner somehow escaping a plane crash on Survive, to Witherspoon waxing about cheetahs finding self-confidence on the savannah in Fierce Queens, to a documentary on James’s I Promise school, to, to, to. It’s an ostentatious and dizzying drop, in line with Katzenberg’s pitch of Quibi – or, rather, the Quibi short-form concept – as era-defining: “Five years from now, we want to come back on this stage and if we were successful, there will have been the era of movies, the era of television and the era of Quibi,” he told a crowd at South by Southwest in 2019. “What Google is to search, Quibi will be to short-form video.” There’s some precedent for a Hollywood pivot to short-form content, which used to be the purview of YouTubers or up-and-comers trying to establish a name on a short budget. (Insecure creator Issa Rae, for example, moved to a full-length HBO sitcom from her minutes-long webseries The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl). In 2019, Netflix debuted several series with episodes of about 15 minutes: Special, Bonding, and the cult-hit sketch comedy series I Think You Should Leave. The quarter-hour comedy series Three Busy Debras, from star Sandy Honig (Isn’t It Romantic) and producer Amy Poehler, premiered in March. Sundance TV experimented with State of the Union, a Nick Hornby-written series in which Rosamund Pike and Chris O’Dowd spend ten minute episodes at a bar before their marital therapy session. But Quibi is dropping into saturated, choppy and disorienting waters – it’s not going up against those modestly successful streaming experiments so much as the free intoxication of TikTok loops and YouTube videos, at a time when the interstitial bits of life Quibi is targeting – arriving 10 minutes ahead of your friends to the bar, waiting for coffee, commuting to school and/or work – have suddenly evaporated. It’s not a good sign for Quibi that podcast downloads in the US, the staple sidekick for many work commutes or background entertainment, have dipped at least 7% since mass shutdowns and work from home orders began in mid-March. “Honestly, we don’t know what to expect,” Whitman told MarketWatch days before Quibi’s launch, though she still saw potential in slipping Quibi into shutdown non-routines: “People still have their in-between moments to be entertained, whether after home schooling or Zoom meetings.” Whether or not people want to be further entertained in those remaining free moments is, it appears, an assumption Quibi has made for us. But whether the service can command the attention it has already assumed to be deeply fractured is, they would say, a bet worth pouring money into. Quibi is now available in the US with a UK date unconfirmed