Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

Comment by whoisjuan | Hacker News Reader

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The problem with Quibi is thinking that they can charge for this content. People are not gonna pay for quick bite videos, even if they have a high production value. Why would anyone do that with such limited time?

The problem of all these platforms is that they think they are creating a new market or expanding an existing one and they forget that people only have 24 hours a day to do things.

If you create something like Quibi you're competing with Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Netflix, Xbox/PlayStation/Nintendo-Switch, Mobile Games and anything else that is trying to grab a slice of you leisure time.

Why would I pay for this when I already pay for other options with more content and get a handful for free?

Quibi is what you get when you think you know your customers but you really don't. It's the type of self-deluded product that is created in an echo chamber by rich people who believe their past success is a formula that can be reproduced at any scale as long as money is involved. The problem with that idea is that it values scale more than ingenuity.

Doing short vertical videos with high production value and charging to watch them is almost an absolute zero in terms of innovation.

Why makes you say this? They wouldn't spend a billion dollars to launch without testing this concept in great detail. Right? Right?

It would take absolutely Katzenburg levels of hubris to think you knew what customers would be without testing it.

Their testing was probably along the lines of "Would you watch videos in a platform like this?" and "How much are you willing to pay for a service like this?"

There are difficulties in overcoming users' expectations and actually monetising, but it shouldn't be ruled out completely. Once people are using something as a major source of entertainment, some proportion of them are usually willing to pay for even mild improvements. An analogy might be free radio broadcasts (and web radio, and piracy) versus modern music streaming services.

Make no mistake, short-form content can be a major entertainment source. Personally, I recently deleted Tiktok from my phone, more because of its power to eat up time when I ought to be sleeping than because of the recent privacy furore.

I dunno, doing short vertical videos with low production value was the huge innovation of TikTok? (Not counting its predecessor, Vine)

But I accept that launching it as a paid service was extremely risky. Better to start with something free and attention-getting.

I think with both Vine and TikTok it's more about the UX of creating and publishing low production value short vertical videos.

Vine videos are thirty seconds, not 10 minutes. It's an entirely different proposition.

It's even more different: Vine videos were only 7 seconds long

Tons and tons of people support youtubers with donations or on patron, which is in effect paying for content. I recognize the difference but I don’t think you can really make your claim so confidently.

My claim is not that people aren't willing to pay for content. My claim is that people are not willing to pay for "this" content at that price point (5 USD) in a saturated market with dozens of competitors launching at the same time with premium content offerings (Disney+, HBO Max, etc).

Also you have staple names like NBC launching services in this space for free (Peacock).

The problem with Quibi is actually a ROI problem and that's why it doesn't work IMHO. If you raise north of 1 billion to build this you are confident that your revenue is going to be significant. I think that there's not a sizeable market for this type of content, in this current market at that price point.

As a reference point, Patreon has only paid $1 billion to creators since its inception. Granted, Patreon is still growing at an accelerated rate and the trajectory seems to indicate that there's a lot of room to keep growing for the foreseeable future, but you can see that if you were to map Patreon payouts to a potential Quibi revenue trajectory they are far from turning green.

I don't think that's a good parallel but just making that comparison since you mentioned that example.

What's NBC? I think that's something my grandmother used to talk about sometimes.

I'm being semi-facetious here. I think "legacy media", particularly network broadcasters, are coasting off brand recognition earned in a bygone era that younger generations never experienced and never will. That's obviously not sustainable in the long run.

I know you're being cheeky, but NBC owns "Friends" and "The Office". Those two series alone account for a large number of streaming hours in Netflix.

Fair point, but both those shows initially found popularity before the streaming era. Is NBC still capable of producing content that people will binge-watch 10-20 years later for a nostalgia kick?

SNL is still fairly popular, as are Brooklyn Nine-nine, Late Night, The Tonight Show, etc. And 30 Rock and Parks and Recreation wrapped up not that long ago.

They also do have a major ace up their sleeve as the official American broadcaster of the Olympics.

Do people binge-watch Late Night or Tonight Show episodes from 15 yrs ago? Or even SNL besides individual sketches?

But that's still very nearly the opposite sort of business model as Quibi. Youtubers generally start out with very little investment and build their audiences manually through grassroots interest. I don't know of anyone who has raised over a billion dollars and created a huge expensive production company upfront before then launching a Patreon account and getting enough $5/month patrons to make it worth it. That idea sounds ludicrous because it likely is ludicrous.

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