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Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Quibi: the new mobile-centric short-form streaming service

Issued on: 30/10/2019 - 04:27 GMT/ZULU

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by Tamara Kachelmeier and Biodun Iginla, France24 Technology reporters

Quibi, the Hollywood-backed streaming service set to launch next April, will offer people on the go short-form content that can be viewed in 10-minute increments only on mobile phones.

Created by Jeffrey Katzenberg, the longtime Disney executive and co-founder of DreamWorks Animation, the new app drew inspiration from Dan Brown's "The Da Vinci Code," which has more than 100 chapters averaging five pages each.

The idea behind the innovative service that has the entertainment world abuzz is to attract younger viewers who are always on the move and who may not have long stretches of time to watch a series episode or a movie in one shot.

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"We created a new platform for on-the-go viewing able to (attract) a hard-to-reach audience," Quibi CEO Meg Whitman explained at a recent conference in Los Angeles.

"Millennials, that's our target audience."

Major studios have pledged $1 billion in funding for the service, which has already attracted big Hollywood names such as Steven Spielberg, Guillermo Del Toro and Jennifer Lopez.

Whitman said Quibi, which stands for "quick bites," will offer Hollywood-quality videos in short form designed exclusively for mobile.

"Everything is being optimized for mobile, whether it's how the content is shot, how we render it," she said.

"We're telling stories in chapters," she said, adding that one of the core features of the streaming service will be 90-minute to two-hour movies told in 10-minute increments.

"The best analogy I have for you in another medium is 'The Da Vinci Code,'" she said, referring to Brown's blockbuster. "The book is 464 pages and every chapter is five pages long because Dan Brown said people didn't want to read for 40 minutes at a time anymore."

Such a format is key to luring the target audience of younger viewers during their daily activities from 7:00 am to 7:00 pm, she said.

One exception will be a horror series in the works by Spielberg that users will only be able to see come nightfall.

Quibi will initially only be available in the United States and Canada and will cost five dollars monthly with ads and eight dollars ad-free.

- Will millennials bite? -

Six months before its launch, the service has already sold out the entire $150 million advertising inventory for its first year.

The big question now is whether subscriptions will follow.

"Candidly, I think there's already proof with YouTube Red that that business model doesn't work," said Tom Nunan, lecturer at UCLA's School of Theater, Film and Television, referring to YouTube's paid service.

"So to me, of all of the new streamers, Quibi is the one that carries the highest risk because they've made this commitment to short form content when there's really no proof that people are willing to subscribe for that content."

But Gene del Vecchio, a marketing and entertainment expert, said he believes Quibi could be viable if younger people are willing to fork out up to eight dollars a month for a new streaming service.

"It fits the lifestyle of today's millennials," he said. "They want quick bites, they want five-minute episodes so that they can watch it in between college classes.

"They can watch it on the go and then they can come back."

Whitman said one added value to Quibi was the fact that the service, which pays the cost of a show plus a 20 percent production fee, licenses the episodes for a set time.

"We license it to our service in its short form for seven years and at the end of seven years, those creators own their own IP," she said.

"They can re-edit that movie into a shorter form... and they can sell it to another window," she added. "So they could sell it to a streaming service, after it's become popular on Quibi! And we're actually fine with that because we don't really think we're competitors."

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Weinstein sexual scandal: millennials boldly denouncing harassment

Latest update : 2017-10-14 19H:26 GMT/UTC/ZULU TIME

by Biodun Iginla, France24, New York

Harvey Weinstein is merely the latest in a line of powerful, establishment men to fall to the clamour of a generation, which as journalist Ronan Farrow showed, refuses to stay silent in the face of inequality and sexual harassment.

Ronan Farrow, the son of Mia Farrow, who broke the story of Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein’s ‘secret habits’ in The New Yorker magazine has seen the realities of sexual harassment committed by powerful Hollywood men spill into his personal life. In 1992, his mother ended her relationship with Woody Allen when she found naked pictures of Soon-Yi, her 21-year-old adopted daughter, in Allen’s possession (Allen later married Soon-Yi). And he has consistently defended his sister, Dylan, who alleges that Allen sexually assaulted her when she was 7 years old.

It’s easy to imagine that this personal history provided an early motivation to investigate the “open secret” of Harvey Weinstein’s decades-long history of sexual harassment and assault. And maybe Ronan’s status as a Hollywood insider by birth left him particularly well-placed to do so. But perhaps more telling is how the story of the 29-year-old Farrow bringing down the 65-year-old Weinstein is emblematic of a larger cultural shift in Hollywood: namely, that Millennials (the generation of youth born between 1982 and 2002) are taking up the mantle of so many of the generations that came before them to denounce harassment.

In the past few years, the media industry has been hit by a series of high profile sexual assault cases involving public figures, from Bill O’Reilly, to Bill Cosby. So has Silicon Valley, where scandals have hit companies ranging from Uber, to Google, to the latest resignation of Amazon Studios head Roy Price over accusations of sexual harassment from his producers.

The young women who spoke out publically likely did so in the knowledge that there's often a price to pay.

“I am actually in debt for whistleblowing,” Susan Fowler wrote on Twitter, after her blog post ignited the storm around Uber that culminated with the company’s founder and CEO, Travis Kalanick, stepping down.

Ellen Pao launched a $16 million dollar lawsuit against venture capital giant Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers.

33-year-old AJ Vandermeyden filed a lawsuit against Tesla after complaints of “pervasive harassment” went unaddressed.

Emily Steele, the New York Times reporter who first broke the sexual harassment story that ultimately forced Bill O’Reilly off the airwaves is also 33.

Andrea Constand, who is now 44, was 32 when she became the first woman to accuse Bill Cosby of sexual assault in a 2005 lawsuit after which the allegation went viral and drew out dozens of corroborating stories.

Recent polling by the Washington Post and the Kaiser Family Foundation shows that women under 34 are most likely to self-identify as ‘feminist’, and by far the most ready to describe feminism as “empowering.” And while they may not be any more vocal than previous generations - contacting public officials at roughly the same rate on women's rights - they take advantage of having access to a plethora of communication outlets via social media to express their views and to reach vaster audiences than their elders did.

And in light of Ronan Farrow’s persistence in pursuing his inquiry into Weinstein’s “sexual assaults”, at least some young men seem to be willing to contribute their voice.

This same generation has been emboldened to speak out having grown up with Title IX (a 1972 law prohibiting discimination in schools on the basis of gender) and choosing to extend the battle lines against sexual assault far beyond the campus. Indeed, the General Social Survey from the Council on Contemporary Families, which has gathered Americans’ views on gender since 1977, shows that amidst evolving attitudes on gender, Millennials, perhaps unsurprisingly, remain the most progressive.

Even so, from Silicon Valley to Hollywood, the culture in industries where sexual harassment can be an “open secret” is often made possible by male silence. Days after the revelation of the accusations against Weinstein, The Guardian contacted more than 20 male actors and directors who had worked with Weinstein at some point: all declined to comment.

Date created : 2017-10-14

Biodun Iginla, BBC News

Tuesday, October 29, 2019

Quibi: the new mobile-centric short-form streaming service

Saturday, October 14, 2017

Weinstein sexual scandal: millennials boldly denouncing harassment

Harvey Weinstein is merely the latest in a line of powerful, establishment men to fall to the clamour of a generation, which as journalist Ronan Farrow showed, refuses to stay silent in the face of inequality and sexual harassment.

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