Quibi is a built-for-millennials streaming service. But will they pay $5 a month?
If Hollywood and Silicon Valley created a baby, they might call it Quibi.
At least, that's how veteran film mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and tech executive Meg Whitman view their fledgling creation.
Quibi, a Hollywood-based streaming company that stands for "quick bites" of video, plans to take new, premium films shot by award-winning directors like Steven Spielberg and Catherine Hardwicke and present them in short episodic chapters about 10 minutes long. The twist: the stories will be developed exclusively for viewing on mobile phones.
The content will be distributed through a new mobile app, designed by a tech team that has consulted with Hollywood creators to make an interface that is appealing to filmmakers and elusive younger audiences.
"What we say internally is we'd like to be the quality of HBO and offer customers the convenience of Spotify," Whitman said in an interview from Quibi's Hollywood office. "We're not Facebook Watch. We're not Snapchat. We're not Instagram TV. We're not YouTube. We're Quibi, and it's not denigrating those platforms at all ... but we're staking out a premium position relative to those."
In the last year, Quibi has made waves
