BANFF – As part of the BWMF Summit Series, Jeffrey Katzenberg one of our industry’s most successful and venerable executives (with a personal fortune in the US$900+ million range), spoke to the assembled masses about his latest endeavour Quibi – the first major entertainment platform purpose-built for high quality, mobile programming – which will debut next year (April 6, 2020 and for $5-$8/month) in Canada and the U.S. simultaneously.
Katzenberg has been feverishly selling this daring vision in old fashioned retail style from Cannes, to Austin, to now Banff.
Randy Lennox, President of Bell Media, did the on-stage interview and Katzenberg shared with the standing-room-only audience that he doesn’t sleep much, “only five hours a night… that way I get an eight-day work week,” and that he doesn’t suffer from jet lag.
(Ed note: I can’t find the eyeroll emoji…)
These factors reinforce his energetic work ethic and “passion for the improbable and impossible… that’s my wheel house… when I’m happiest,” he said.
Much of the early part of this conversation/exposition featured vignettes about Leonard Nimoy remarking on Katz’s early-start workdays, his growing up in a privileged household comfortable with the term “socialism”, Katz’s dyslexia which has him seeing the word NO as ON, his mentors like Barry Diller, his philosophy that “if you don’t play offence you never win… you gotta swing or take a shot,” and how he got himself fired from Disney in 1994 just as his bets Lion King was the number one animated film and Home Improvement was the top-rated TV show… go figure.
His big swing these days is Quibi (which stands for quick bites), and Katzenberg is aiming huge by going all in on the smallest screen.
He said he’s been thinking about Quibi for the last 20 years and sees it as the next major form for the film narrative as a multi-genre, multi-formatted high-end Hollywood offering of story-telling in quick bites for millennials, designed to mesh with their real-time lifestyles.
Katzenberg sees this new platform for 25-to-35 year old digital natives as “a huge growth initiative for the entire industry… focusing on 6-to-15 minute mobile chapters on your smartphone… in three years at Banff we’ll be in the Quibi era.”
And the industry isn’t quibbling over Quibi… it’s buying in big time.
He’s already secured $1 billion in initial backing from entities like Fox, Viacom, Disney, NBCU, plus Lionsgate, MGM, Sony, and several strategic investors from China including Alibaba.
With that treasure he’s already produced over 125 pieces of original content (with names like Del Toro, Spielberg, Jennifer Lopez, and soon-to-be-former NBA Champion Steph Curry) for a keenly identified audience that in 2012 spent just six minutes a day watching video on mobile phones — but now spends in excess of 70.
“Just like HBO changed the relationship between TV and advertising with the slogan ‘It’s not TV It’s HBO’ we’re going to change viewing again.” – Jeffrey Katzenberg
“Just like HBO changed the relationship between TV and advertising with the slogan ‘It’s not TV It’s HBO’ we’re going to change viewing again with ‘It’s not YouTube or Facebook or Amazon… It’s Quibi!” says Katzenberg.
There are plenty of intriguing aspects in this nifty, audacious move. One is that after seven years or so, product produced by Quibi at “cost plus 20%” reverts entirely back to the actual creators. Another is a feature titled “Daily Essentials” that pushes local, curated news and information content for “mobile devices on the go.”
The Quibi platform itself employs new algorithms around video compression and viewing quality; and $470 million is targeted for marketing of Quibi’s content and platform in year one.
Looking to the future, Katzenberg sees “only three or four portals for TV-like platforms offering more content than people can watch… in music it’s a duopoly between Apple and Spotify… and then Quibi offering short form content… you know, HBO, Hulu, Netflix have less than 10% viewing on phones… then there’s ESports and gaming, we’ll have five or six minutes on Daily Essentials… and interactive is being engineered.”
The guy, and his partner Meg Whitman (former HP and eBay CEO and failed Golden State Republican gubernatorial candidate) appear to have thought this through.
Moreover, Katzenberg has always been a born wizard of the hustle, and who am I to quibble with that.
Photo by Kristian Bogner
