Seeing as #Quibi has only been out for 24 hours, I am in no position to give my opinions, but I’m gonna do it anyway.

The product is sleek and well-timed, but there are major (fixable) problems with the model that need to be changed.

My thoughts - a thread;

1/ Quibi’s 10 min vids play beautifully off of our tiny attention spans, but I fear that Quibi won’t be able to meet demand. Users will decide if they want to finish the episode in the first few secs. Bad for Quibi. If I get bored of a video on TikTok, I scroll to the next one…

2/ …If I get bored of a video on Quibi, I’ll exit the app. Barriers to watching short-form content (even as small as having to click on content to see it) increase the bounce rate if the content isn’t engaging. Hence why most social media apps adopted a continuous feed.

3/ Even with $1b of production costs and 3hrs of fresh content each weekday, it can’t replicate the variety that social media apps provide. That’s why Quibi could be a great YouTube channel — creating a standalone media platform is a different beast.

4/ Speaking of content generation, Quibi will never be profitable if their relevance relies on bringing on celebs like @chancetherapper or @chrissyteigen. Youtube Originals tried that. It’s not scalable.

5/ Once they’ve sucked users in with these big names, Quibi needs to continue to create good content at a lower production cost (less celebs) for this to scale. Creating good, sustainable content for an audience with a minuscule attention span is tough.

6/ I agree with @jmj here, content is king, and Jeff Katzenburg definitely knows great content, but will the same skills that made Star Trek a hit in the 1979 make 10-minute videos a hit in 2020? Not all of those skills are transferrable. https://twitter.com/jmj/status/1247322408022724610?s=20

7/ Recent shows/movies on streaming platforms have taken off because of fan-made social media buzz. Think Baby Yoda and “The Mandalorian” or Joe Exotic and “Tiger King”. This “meme-ability” filled in the missing piece to the virality puzzle: user-generated content.

8/ This virality is important; Quibi will need a “Tiger King” equivalent to take off.

Hard to do when you can’t screenshot. The content was made to be meme’d, so this seems like an archaic privacy measure. Viral content won’t go viral if you don’t give it a vehicle to do so.

9/ However, the two biggest qualms with Quibi (can’t screenshot and mobile-only) aren’t fundamental problems with the business model. Quibi has been years in the making, but there is no way to replicate what you learn on launch day. I think they will change these features.

End/ I think most users will probably churn after the trial, but it is too soon to tell and I’m sure there will be many iterations in the next 90 days.

Plus, coronavirus threw an interesting wrench into Quibi’s launch plans and value add. The next few months will be interesting.