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Quibi — How It Will Retrain Our Brains and be a Success

Paul Burke
4 min readApr 8, 2020

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Quibi seems like an outlandish proposition.

In a world flushed with digital programming, content and competitors, Quibi raised $1.8 BILLION dollars from investors before launching what seems like just another streaming service.

That’s a highly unusual path for a consumer startup, even one that is ran by business moguls like Quibi is — Meg Whitman, former CEO of HP, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, former chairman for Disney.

Struck by curiosity, I downloaded Quibi as soon as it became available to download on April 6th. I closed the app about 10 minutes later highly impressed.

Quibi will be a success and reinvent how we consume television programming.

Here is why.

The Formula for Television Programming

Nearly every television program for the last 75 years has been structured the same.

  1. 30-minute slot with 7–9 minutes of commercials
  2. 1-hour slot with 14–18 minutes of commercials

We’re trained to consume television programming in these two formats. This structure has given us timeless shows like The Office, Seinfeld and Friends and hour-long shows like Breaking Bad. We’re all very comfortable with it.

But as we all know, our attention spans are not what they were 20 years ago.

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Paul Burke
Paul Burke

Written by Paul Burke

Entrepreneur, Observationist and Wannabe Writer

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