Comment by mrkwse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mrkwse | Hacker News Reader

The Verge article on this raised the point that shortform video is a crowded market with TikTok, YouTube, etc. which I'd agree is probably what crowded Quibi out. I've just started a YouTube Premium subscription and expect I'll continue paying for that once the free trial ends, whereas even at half the price, Quibi just didn't have the content or familiarity to get my money at the end of the trial.

One thing I do have to commend Quibi for, however, is how well they reversioned their video content. I think they will be seen as a little ahead of the competition there (possibly before their time). Against other content houses that will have significantly more footage to get through (and/or less resources for this task).

I think the different versions (e.g. portrait/landscape for Quibi) will be a little way off being that common. I expect computer vision tooling will enable it more broadly when it can at least expedite the process considerably (which probably isn't a huge distance off although then the blocker is organisational processes around publishing video).

Short-form social media is a booming and crowded market. Short-form video is not.

In the former case it's mostly social media, the main value here is memes and/or following creators/influencers; there is never a storyline or a "show" to follow per-se.

Quibi's business model would be that people would not only be interested in a storyline contained within bite-sized chunks of video but that they would actually pay for it. This is a flawed idea; when it comes to a story people want it to go as long as possible (and the pause button is a thing that exists already), there's no reason to want artificially-constrained storylines when you can get the longform equivalent on Netflix for the same price.

I actually do think there is a market for bite-sized chunks of video with a unifying storyline. There's a reason that all tv show episodes aren't just one long episode. So why not push the boundaries of that and break up a normal tv show episode into smaller ones?

It seems there are 3 different types of videos with decreasing segment (or episode) lengths: movies, tv shows, bite-sized shows. Each has its own place for user needs. I think sometimes people don't want to (or don't have time) watch a full movie, so they opt for a tv episode. Similarly, sometimes they don't want to watch a full tv episode.

Reversioning is the key here. Quibi could become a $100B company just on that.

The portrait / landscape mode should be gamified.

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