Sam Brooks takes a look at new American streaming service Quibi, and asks what sets it apart from all the rest.

So what is Quibi and what makes it different?

Quibi is a new streaming service based out of the US with one twist: you can only watch it on your phone. Or, to use the Quibi parlance, it’s designed specifically to deliver short-form scripted and unscripted content to your phone. The platform is the brainchild of former Disney and Dreamworks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay chief executive Meg Whitman, and they plan to spend US$1.1bn on over 7,000 pieces of original content in its first year.

The name is a mixture of the word ‘quick’ and ‘bites’, and episodes are designed to be seven-to-ten minutes, rather than the usual 20-30 minute or 40-60 minute duration of conventional scripted television.

What’s on it?

Quibi aims to cover pretty much everything under the dual umbrellas of scripted and unscripted – comedy, drama, reality TV, documentary, news, game shows. It’s all of these things but in shorter chunks.

The shows are divided into three major groups:

Firstly, the marquee scripted titles, referred to as ‘Movies in Chapters’. These run between two and two-and-a-half hours each season, divided into a dozen or so daily episodes (or chapters). A new show of this kind will be released, on average, every two weeks. Added up, it roughly makes a movie, which Quibi has signalled may later be released on other services after a two-year exclusivity contract. Some of these will be self-contained, while others have the option to have further ‘chapters’.

Secondly, marquee unscripted titles will be called ‘Unscripted and Docs’. These include reality shows, documentaries and competition shows but will be mostly self-contained.

And finally, there’s ‘Daily Essentials’. Basically, the news. A variety of news organisations from around the world (NBC News, the BBC, Telemundo, CTV, and uh, TMZ) will produce daily news updates ranging from essential news to daily pop culture and lifestyle stories.

What are the big shows to look out for?

There’s a lot out there, but here’s what’s caught my interest (note how many fit the frequently applied description of Quibi as ‘joke 30 Rock shows come-to-life’):

• Fierce Queens: An animal docuseries following how female animals survive and thrive in the wild. Reese Witherspoon does the voiceover.
• Most Dangerous Game: Liam Hemsworth stars as an expectant dad whose cancer diagnosis forces him to take a huge risk.
• Memory Hole: Will Arnett walks us through obscure, forgotten pop culture moments from decades past.
• Survive: Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) stars as a suicidal woman who finds out she can’t commit suicide after her plane crashes.
• Nikki Fresh: A Nicole Ritchie mockumentary (maybe?) where she attempts to pivot to making a trap album for ‘moms and gays’.
• Murder House Flip: People try to flip houses where murders have occurred.
• Dishmantled: Titus Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) hosts this cooking competition show where entrees are blasted out of cannons onto contestants. After tasting them, they have to make what they think the dish used to be. I promise I’m not making this up.
• The Gayme Show: A game show where two gay men judge straight men to determine who is the gayest.
• Singled Out: A reboot of the classic MTV dating show, with a social media-related twist.
• Chrissy’s Court: Chrissy Teigen as Judge Judy.
• Punk’d: The same as it always was, but shorter.

You can find a full list of these definitely real shows right here.

That sounds like a lot of content.

Yes and no. While Quibi promises to provide 7,000 pieces of original content within the year, that includes everything from the movies in chapter to the daily news essentials, so it’ll add up fairly quickly. Still, it’s a promise of a lot of things to watch with your phone securely glued to your hand.

It’s worth noting that this is one of the reasons that Quibi has been the source of both punchlines and scepticism online; it’s so much content, and a lot of it, frankly, sound like fake joke shows from 30 Rock.

The other is its business model. To quote Bloomberg’s Hollywood Torrent newsletter: “It’s spending a fortune on programmes it doesn’t own, and is making shows for people to watch in their doctor’s office. Most people already have plenty to do when they are idle (YouTube, Instagram, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter, texting, email, games), and almost all of it is free.”

Do I have to hold my phone horizontally?

Amazingly, no.

Katzenberg has promised that Whitman and her team of “50 product and engineering” people have been figuring out ways to make viewing shows on Quibi easier than, say, watching Netflix or YouTube on your phone. This new way includes a “turnstyle” mode, which allows the viewer to watch a show in landscape or portrait mode, and move between them instantly. This has the run-on effect of producers potentially having to shoot two different versions of a show to make the “turnstyle” work properly.

Other technology the service is exploring varies from forward-thinking (think interactivity, like Netflix’s Bandersnatch or any video game) to the gimmicky (Steven Spielberg, an early supporter of the service, has a planned horror series that will only be available to stream after sunset, wherever the user may be).

And I really can’t watch it on my TV or laptop?

Not officially. If you can figure out how to cast or mirror your phone to your TV, then you can. There are a lot of guides online on how to do this if you’re so inclined, but Quibi is quite serious about this – it’s content for your phone, not your TV.

Where do I sign up?

If you join before the 30 April, you get a 90-day free trial. After that, it’s $13.99 a month if you want the ad-free version. If you’re happy to watch ads, you can get it for $8.49 a month.

The Quibi app is available on iOS and Google Play.

Tara Ward talks to Spencer Stoner, the producer of Go Further South, the slow TV sensation that hits our screens this Easter.  

Let’s change Good Friday’s name to “Great Friday”, or maybe “Even Better Friday”, because Prime is giving us the television tonic every lockdown needs. Go Further South, the slow-TV sequel to 2019’s Go South, lands softly and quietly on our screens tomorrow, taking us on an epic 12-hour journey deep into the Southern Ocean, past the subantarctic islands and along the Ross Sea coast, finishing at Scott Base in Antarctica.

That’s right. This weekend, we’re all going to Antarctica.

We bloody loved Go South – a gloriously relaxed train, boat and car journey through some of New Zealand’s most scenic landscapes – when it screened last year. “I’ve never worked on a show where I’ve gotten that level of feedback and enthusiasm from people before,” says Go Further South producer Spencer Stoner. It was only a matter of time until we got another pick at the slow TV grazing platter of life, and this time Spencer’s team has upped the stakes by sailing all the way to Antarctica, a place most New Zealanders won’t ever have the good fortune to visit.

“We didn’t want to rehash Go South and do a similar trip, treading through the same places,” Spencer says. “We thought, how can we build on this idea, but still focus on interesting New Zealand stories? What if we show them something completely different that they’ve never seen before?”

They teamed up with Heritage Expeditions, a Christchurch-based cruise company that ventures to the remotest parts of the Southern Ocean. While much of Go Further South’s journey is spent at sea, the trip also includes visits to several subantarctic islands, like Macquarie Island and Franklin Island, home to one of the world’s oldest penguin colonies.

“Being there was like nothing else I’ve seen on Earth,” Spencer says. “New Zealand was instrumental in having the Ross Sea protected as an international marine protected area, and it’s incredible sailing through there. You see a crazy amount of penguins, crazy amounts of orca, all sorts of wildlife. It’s like travelling through an alien planet.”

It might seem weird to dedicate an entire day to a show where nothing much happens, but that’s the beauty of slow-TV. There are no commercial breaks or interrupting voiceovers, just 12 soothing hours of stunning landscapes and incredible wildlife. Go Further South is the perfect show to sink into during a national lockdown, a restoring balm to remind you that even though things are a bit stink right now, the world is still filled with beautiful and astonishing wonders.

“The advantage of being in lockdown is that you can have Go Further South playing while you’re going about your day to day life in your house,” Spencer reckons. “You can check-in and out of the show, and get the full experience in the way it’s meant to be watched.

“There are chunks of time when we’re just at sea, appreciating the different phases and characteristics of the Southern Ocean. There are also times where, in classic slow-TV fashion, you can let the camera linger on a shot for minutes at a time,” Spencer says. This is which is where the hypnotic, calming power of slow-TV takes hold. “People have the opportunity to visually explore the landscape, without having a story shoved in their face.”

Making Go Further South proved a bigger challenge than Go South, thanks to the fierce unpredictability of the Southern Ocean. The crew operated cameras from a central control room on the ship, which allowed them to capture every important moment of the journey despite the 13 metre swells, overwhelming sea-sickness and freezing temperatures. A special rig was attached to the top of the ship to stabilise the main camera, which removed the shake from the waves and let the crew zoom in at close range of all the action at sea.

“I can say that the rumours about how rough the Southern Ocean is are totally warranted,” Spencer says. “I would wake up in the middle of the night because my head was slamming into the wall. We were told we had good conditions, but they were very rough.” It wasn’t Spencer’s only dicey moment. He fell into a lagoon while visiting Franklin Island, and with hours of footage still to film, he had no choice but to take a cleansing dip in the sea. “It was one of those moments when you’re washing yourself in water that’s basically zero degrees, wondering how you got there.”

Slow TV may have originated in Scandinavia, but Spencer reckons New Zealand has embraced the trend and made it our own. “I think we’ve reinvented the genre of slow TV a little bit, into something which suits our unique situation. We’re surrounded by incredibly diverse landscapes with interesting histories and things are constantly changing,” he says. “What’s cool about New Zealand slow TV is that the pace is slow, but you don’t have to wait long to see something completely different from what you’ve been looking at.”

What’s the next journey in the slow-TV landscape for Spencer and his team? “We keep joking that the next one will be Go North, and it will just be a three-week cruise around Fiji,” Spencer says. Sounds perfect.

Go Further South screens on Prime on Good Friday, the 10th of April, from 7:30am. You can watch a three-hour version of the original Go South from 7:15pm on Easter Sunday, the 12th of April, also on Prime.