Jeffrey Katzenberg Believes Quibi Is The Next Generation Of Storytelling

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Best known for his work with Walt Disney Studios and DreamWorks Animation, seasoned film producer and Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg discusses why the next wave of storytelling is designed for our phones.

Video Transcript

JEFFREY KATZENBERG: If you think about it, we've had two generations up to now we've had movies, which are two hour stories we watch in a single sitting, mostly in movie theaters. Then we have TV, which is principally 13 to 26 episodes of a long form story that we're told in chapters that are an hour piece that you watched on a television set. And we have seen that continue to evolve today with streaming.

And we believe the next generation in storytelling are going to be these great movies told in chapters that are designed exclusively for your telephone. That idea of doing something new and original and creative was highly, highly appealing to the really best storytellers and filmmakers in Hollywood.

Then when we showed them this new technology that allowed them to shoot these in a new way that would make watching it on your phone beautiful-- most stuff, 82% of content we watch on our phones, is like a little box across the top of the screen. And it's fine and we've all been used to it and doing it. But it doesn't really take advantage of what could you possibly do with this device. And so that's where our technology innovation comes into play.

And the combination of new type of storytelling, new technology, and a business model that allows all of our suppliers to actually own their IP-- because we only license it from them-- those three things together became undeniable. And so virtually everybody has shown up and made content for us.

- OK. You've got a phone there. Do you have Quibi loaded? I bet you do. Can you show us a little bit about what it looks like?

JEFFREY KATZENBERG: Sure. What I'll do is let me just show you a few, maybe 10, 12, seconds of a show called Shape of Pasta which is a beautiful show by this amazing chef here in Los Angeles, who is considered one of the great pasta chefs in the world who went to Italy to try and find eight new pastas. And so it's called the Shape of Pasta. So here's just a little look at what this looks like on your phone.

- Whoa!

JEFFREY KATZENBERG: So anytime you say turn, it automatically goes to a beautiful image no matter how you're holding the phone. So it doesn't matter whether it's in portrait, which is how we mostly hold our phones, or in landscape, which is particularly good when it's scripted storytelling. But no matter which way you hold it, it's beautiful. And so that was a real innovation and something that became very appealing to great filmmakers to use this new technology, and use it in a way that we've never seen anything like it before.

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