Quibi, a short-form, mobile-focused video streaming venture, now has some concrete details about when it will arrive and how much it will cost.
Founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman said during a conference last weekend that Quibi will launch on April 6, 2020, and have two service tiers. The base tier will cost $4.99 per month, and 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. The service will also offer an ad-free option for $7.99 per month.
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.
Katzenberg offered some details about how Quibi’s content budget will work. The service will cover costs plus 20% up to $6 million an hour, according to Variety.
RELATED: Deeper Dive—Hopefully, Quibi knows what it’s doing
Quibi also confirmed some licensing agreement rumors that were featured in a report from Digiday last week. The service will hold exclusive seven-year rights to the short-segment versions of programs, but creators after two years will get rights for full-length, non-segmented versions of their products, which they can license to other global services.
Questions still remain about Quibi’s distribution strategy for its service. A report last week from Digiday suggested that Quibi will forego building streaming apps for TVs and focus only on mobile apps. It’s a move that could cause Quibi to miss out on a big potential audience, and hamstring the company even if it’s successful on mobile, according to Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst at nScreenMedia.
“I understand why they did it, but my gut tells me it’s a mistake,” he said.