Short-form video streaming service Quibi is still nearly a year away from its 2020 launch, but its leaders are already sharing specific expectations for the service.
Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman were at the Cannes Lions show in France this week where they revealed that Quibi has already sold approximately $100 million in advertising inventory ahead of launch. The company has signed on six brand launch partners: Procter & Gamble, PepsiCo, Anheuser-Busch, Walmart, Progressive and Google, according to Deadline.
Advertising dollars will be a key source of revenue considering the split between ad-supported and ad-free subscribers that Quibi is expecting. Whitman said that the service is anticipating 75% of subscribers will go for the less expensive $4.99-per-month ad-supported tier.
Quibi, which is officially launching on April 6, 2020, will also offer a $7.99-per-month tier with no ads.
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Although it sounds like the majority of Quibi subscribers will be seeing ads, it doesn’t sound like they’ll be bombarded. As Deadline points out, the service is planning to show about two and a half minutes of advertising during every hour of programming, which will be broken up into short segments. That’s well below the average amount of advertising per hour on broadcast, cable and other AVOD services like Hulu.
Earlier this month, Quibi announced that the ad-supported tier will include one pre-roll ad before each video segment. The ad will be 10 seconds if the video is less than five minutes, and 15 seconds if the video is between five and 10 minutes long.
According to Variety, Whitman said that Quibi will have approximately 7,000 pieces of content when it launches. Series on Quibi will be two-to-four hours long and will be divided into segments that will be no longer than 10 minutes each.