Hollywood came down to embrace the “microtography” and the failed Quibi five years later, the “disguised earth.”

In an invisible office on Sunset Avenue in Los Angeles, the former Quibi executives sat around, their cell phones were scattered over the table, and their latest work was shown on the screen: A science-fiction horror film about high school students travelling through time and space, with only 90 seconds per set.

“This feels familiar, yet different,” said Jason Hirsch, former producer of Quibi. Today, he is operating Microverse Studios, a new media company focused on the production of a “micro-short play”. “I think this time we got it right!”

Jason Hirsch (right)

Quibi was created in April 2020 by a Hollywood producer, Jeffrey Kassenberg (formerly President Disney, founder of the Dream Factory) and former Hewlettmann CEO Meg Whitman, but was one of the most dramatic business failures in the early years of the epidemic, one of six months of operation, owing to the impact of the epidemic and the inability to match high-cost production and player consumption habits.

The purpose of Quibi is to change the pattern of crude and indiscriminate short video content at the time, through the production of short and fine videos by professional teams. Quib tried to stuff Hollywood stars and film-class productions into a show within 10 minutes, and the idea was good, but the market at the time did not accept this form. However, who could think that the idea of Quibi, a high-quality short play designed for mobile phone connections, was “obscenity conversion” in a way that Quibi had not anticipated, and had flourished on platforms such as TikTok, Instagram Reels and micro-intelligence.

These “micro-short dramas”, usually lasting between one and three minutes per set, are in a vertical-screen format and are replaced by up-slides. Combining the exaggerations of soap operas (traffics, revenge, homogeneity), a boom in young audiences created a multi-billion-dollar global industry.

“The timing and distribution patterns of Quibi were wrong, but its core philosophy was right,” said Jason Hirsch. “Audiences are now used to using screens on their phones. The difference is that they watch on a platform that is already familiar and in daily use, rather than being forced to download a new application.”

According to The New York Times, the major Hollywood studios and streaming media giants are rapidly entering the microtrip. The Warner brothers have recently become a specialized play department and have partnered with TikTok to launch the original series. Paramount is in the process of adapting its classic IP (e.g. Father, ” The Disk ” ) to a stand-up short play format. Even apples were tested in the Apple TV+ application.

“This is about the economy of attention,” said the head of the Warner Brothers short play department. “Users spend hours on short video platforms every day. We want to provide fascinating stories in their “fields” in formats they like.”

Hollywood’s short play boom was largely inspired by the tremendous success of the domestic social platform micro-program. These interactive dramas, which operate on Twitter, usually take the form of a fee-for-locking model (free of charge in previous episodes and subsequent payments), which last year generated more than $5 billion in domestic revenue. Reading groups and fast-reading comics are actively moving this model to the global level.

“The Chinese market has proven that the business model of the micro-short play is perfectly viable”, said Jason Hirsch. “The key is that very low user access costs and very high rate of fee conversion.”

Hollywood can smell the business opportunities. Chinese companies are transforming Hollywood into a stand-up mode, while American producers are seeking to enter the Chinese market. Paramount has partnered with the Queue Video to turn the classic aesthetic ” Flying the Sea ” into an 80-episode micro-short play, which is adapted locally for about two minutes each, setting the background in Shanghai.

Flying Love Sea.

For Hollywood, the mini-short play market remains a blue sea and challenges remain. Critics argue that the majority of micro-blind plays rely on a high-intensity stimuli, such as clichés of dog blood and exaggerating violence, as well as marginal hints, to attract the audience quickly and lack depth. The review of content is also a challenge for the Platform.

Moreover, most important of all, there is a natural conflict between the high production costs of Hollywood and the “low-cost, high-swirling” short flat model on which the mini-short drama depends. Quibi tried to produce short video content with a high budget (up to $100,000 per production set) and the results were well known.

“The lesson of Quibi is that economies of scale do not work in the field of short play,” says Meredith Berry, a partner of the venture capital firm Lightsseed, analysing: “The new entrants need to adapt to a more streamlined production model. The cost of a successful micro-short play is usually in the range of $50 to $20,000, much lower than the traditional one.”

In Microverse Studios, Jason Hirsch and his team, many of whom had worked with Quibi, believed that they had found a winning formula. Now they focus on typologies (fiction, doubt, romantic comedy), using potential but cost-controllable actors, and using algorithms to optimize the play to ensure that hooks appear at the first 15 seconds’ golden point of time, so that they can “fish” quickly to the audience.

Microverse Studios

Jason Hirsch laughed at the interview: “We joked that it was Quibi’s “ghost.” But this time it’s different, the platform is still there, and the audience habits have developed. We no longer need to tell the market what a short-screen play is, but to focus on good stories that the audience cannot resist.”

On TikTok, the science fiction of Microverse Studios, Time Rift, has accumulated millions of playouts. This is perhaps the sweetest revenge for Hollywooders who had experienced the collapse of Quibi: Quibi’s vision was finally realized, in a way that it did not anticipate.