From Quibi’s ashes, new short-form streamers are thriving

Four years after Quibi’s $1.75 billion crashout, its successors are flying high.

Apps like DramaBox and ReelShort are betting on short-form. They present feature-length films, diced into consumable minutes-long bites akin to a TikTok. The more clips you want to see, the more you’ll have to pay. And it’s worked: Both apps report over $20 million in revenue from in-app purchases, and have climbed the charts above entertainment stalwarts like Hulu and Prime Video.

The rise of the short-form streamer

In January, The New York Times asked: “Minute-Long Soap Operas Are Here. Is America Ready?” The consumer response has proven it is. Short-form apps now often rank above legacy streamers, and make tens of millions in revenue from in-app purchases. Thanks to some savvy ad placements, they just keep growing.

At first glance, these apps look a lot like TikTok. Their clips are often around one minute long, viewed in vertical mode on your phone. To get from one clip to the next, you swipe up, replicating TikTok’s infinite scroll. But TikTok’s algorithmic feed makes multi-part content challenging. There’s no guarantee that your audience will give that profile bubble a click, finding the adjoining videos. That’s where these short-form streamers differ, making a singular feed for each film-like plot.

At the top of the industry, ReelShort and DramaBox jostle for first place. The duo are almost exactly equal for in-app purchase revenue, each collecting a combined $28 million across iOS and Google, per Appfigures. But DramaBox crushes ReelShort in app store rankings. In the Apple App Store, DramaBox ranks 9th to ReelShort’s 15th, above Peacock and Hulu. In Google Play, DramaBox leads the market in third place, ahead of streaming juggernaut Netflix. ReelShort lags in 23rd.

There’s something irreconcilably cheesy about these apps, making it difficult to take them seriously against the bigger streamers. After all, they traffic in short-form soaps, spitting out minute-by-minute clips of “My Secret Agent Husband” or “One Fateful Night With My Boss.” But, with shrinking attention spans and minimized interest in prestige television, maybe these apps are Hollywood’s next big product.

The bones of Quibi

DramaBox and ReelShort aren’t the first short-form experimenters. That title belongs to Quibi, Jeffrey Katzenberg’s 2018 media experiment. Katzenberg collected $1.75 billion from investors to prop up his streamer, before dissolving in 2020 and selling off its library to Roku for less than $100 million.

There are several reasons why these streamers have succeeded where Quibi couldn’t. Quibi went for prestige, pumping out shows with Anna Kendrick and LeBron James. ReelShort leans more into larger-than-life romances and thrillers. Quibi also embraced the traditional subscription model, charging $8/month with a brief free trial. Compare that to DramaBox, which offers twelve free episodes before offering a pay-per-view model, profiting on sheer human impatience.

But these apps could also prove that Katzenberg’s idea was well-founded, if mistimed. Quibi premiered in 2018, the same year Musical.ly became TikTok. They then shuddered in 2020, right as TikTok was ascending. Nowadays, when short-form video is king and each social media company looks to build their own knockoff, the market seems more tenable. Who knows how a 2024 Quibi would perform.