Quibi Drops Star-Studded New Trailers For Shows I Don’t Want to Watch on My Phone

The universe is filled with many questions: Why are we here? What happens when we die? And WTF is Quibi? Quibi (short for “quick bites”) is, in fact, the latest streaming service spearheaded by Hollywood mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg that offers bite-sized chunks of entertainment starring some of the industry’s biggest celebrities in front of and behind the camera.

Quibi’s deal is this: celebrity-laden content delivered in 10 minutes or less straight to your phone. These videos will be available to watch in both portrait and landscape video simultaneously thanks to proprietary technology called Turnstyle. And Katzenberg has assembled an insane squad of talent, including Steven Spielberg, whose Spielberg After Dark is a horror series that will only be available at night.

There’s a remake of Most Dangerous Game starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz. There’s a reboot of The Fugitive with Kiefer Sutherland. There’s this comedy Flipped with Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson about home renovators who accidentally renovate a drug lord’s stash house:

There’s also the adventure series Survive, which stars Sophie Turner (Sansa!) and Corey Hawkins (Straight Outta Compton) as plane crash survivors who must brave the wilderness to be rescued.

Oh, and there’s this cat and mouse horror series The Stranger, where Dane DeHaan (Valerian and the City of a Thousand Planets) terrorizes Maika Monroe (It Follows) during the Uber ride from Hell:

These shows and movies are joined by several others, including a car racing show with Idris Elba, a drag show with Sasha Velour, and a fake court TV show with Chrissyt Teigen. Do these shows look watchable? Sure. Will I be watching them?

Absolutely not.

And it’s not for lack of interest. It’s because I don’t like watching content on my phone. Granted, I may be alone in this as an “old” in my mid-30s, but watching high quality content on my tiny phone screen doesn’t seem like something I want to pay for. Quibi will cost $5/month with ads and $8 without, which isn’t much. But, I’m already subscribing to Netflix, Hulu, Amazon, etc., and I’m not in the market for content that I can only watch on my phone.

And I can’t be the only person who doesn’t want to squint their way through a series. But there is plenty of extremely popular digital content that I simply don’t get. Like Twitch, or YouTube prank shows or Instagram influencers or Miranda Sings (is she just a bad singer? That’s it, that’s the joke?).

There is obviously an audience for this stuff, who never knew a world without wireless internet. But will they even give a crap about the name brand recognition when audiences are more interested in brands than movie stars?

As the streaming wars continue, some services soar while others flounder. Disney+ continues its strong run and is expected to reach 25 million subscribers this quarter. Apple TV+ boasts an estimated 33.6 million subscribers, although those numbers include an unknown amount of subscribers enjoying a free year of the service with purchase of an Apple product.

Only time will tell whether or not Quibi is the future of streaming content. What do you think? Will you be subscribing to Quibi?

(via AVClub)

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