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Comment by fastball | Hacker News Reader

I don't know anyone that has used their phone less during lockdown.

I haven't used it for watching video media, that's gone way down now that I'm not commuting. When I watch videos now it's almost always on the TV instead. I'm not even sure if my streaming device supports Quibi.

Isn't the whole pitch that they're bite-sized? So you'll watch a clip on the toilet or while waiting for your turn in the covid test line. Mobile games and most apps are doing better than ever. This whole thing had a very "fellow kids" vibe, so I think the content must have been the main sticking point.

Yes, but you have no idea how long that bite size will last. While scrolling your feeds or playing most games, you can stop at any time. You can't say ahead of time "I'm going to spend 6-8 min waiting in this line / at the toilet, enough for a byte-sized episode".

There is this thing called a pause button. Which basically invalidates the whole concept of “bite-sized” entertainment to begin with. My biggest deterrent from streaming video away from home is data usage, not the length of the content.

I don't know if other people feel the same way, but I definitely feel a downside whenever I get invested in something (even a small bite of something) and then have to pause halfway through and resume at a later date/time. Tension drops, references to earlier things lose some meaning, you're completely pulled out of whatever you were watching and it starts feeling more like a disjointed effort to watch instead of a singular experience to enjoy.

I thought everyone felt this way.

Yep, that’s the irony: as much as they promote bite sized entertainment, their ten minutes is still too long for the use case they’re looking at. For people on the go (in transit, waiting in line), users want content that you can drop immediately. Like Reddit of Facebook or instagram. At the point where they’re willing to focus attention ... they want much longer stuff anyway. Quibi fails on both fronts.

Edit: well, someone else said it more succinctly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24856020

There is no pause button on human emotion. Good content evokes emotions. There’s a reason we use violent phrases like “torn away” when describing being pulled from an emotional state that some content put us in.

If you're just going to pause it midway anyway, why not watch an actual episode of a real show on a streaming service you already have?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com