BBC Studios has recently invested in Quibi and the company now owns a small stake in the forthcoming streaming service. Quibi is a mobile-focused streaming service that creates short-form content for subscribers.
The investment comes following the BBC Studio’s first commission on the platform. The Natural History Unit of the BBC, which produced Planet Earth and Blue Planet, will produce Fierce Queens. Fierce Queens (working title) is an educational show about female animals.
A spokesperson from the BBC said, “We are pleased to have concluded an investment in Quibi and we both see good opportunities to work together on future projects.” BBC Studios is not the only company to invest in Quibi. BBC Studios will join other major studios such as Disney, NBCUniversal, Viacom, Sony, Warner Bros., MGM, and foriegn companies such as eOne (Canada), Alibaba Group (China), and ITV (England) as Quibi investors.
Quibi was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and is expecting to launch in April of 2020. Quibi has already received one hundred million dollars in advance advertising sales with popular brands like Google and PepsiCo. Subscribers can expect to pay between five and eight dollars for the service. The smaller price includes advertisements with a ten-second ad if the video under five minutes or a fifteen-second ad for videos that are between five and ten minutes. There will be a wide range of videos for subscribers to choose from as Whitman is expecting approximately seven thousand pieces of content to be available in the first year.
Numerous projects have already been confirmed to be in development, including a science fiction show from Catherine Hardwicke called Don’t Look Deeper, a murder mystery from the minds of great comedians, an action series with Liam Hemsworth (Independence Day: Resurgence), and Spielberg After Dark a show from Steven Spielberg that can only be watched at night.