Guillermo del Toro and Sam Raimi are making shows for a new streaming service with a dumb name

By Sam Barsanti | October 10, 2018 | 8:21pm

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We’re all still reeling from the loss of Go90 and Seeso, but DreamWorks co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett Packard CEO Meg Whitman have teamed up to new develop yet another streaming service that has yet another stupid name. The project was initially operating under the codename “NewTV,” which should give you an idea of how stupid we’re talking, but the real name Katzenberg and Whitman are going with is “Quibi,” which is short for “quick bites of content.” It’s not bad in the way that calling a streaming service something like “Fart Machine” would be bad, but—like Go90, Seeso, and even Netflix—it sounds like the sort of thing a board room would come up with as a good way to describe what makes this company different from every other other company. Also, we’re pretty sure Quibi is the name of a Pokémon, but if not, it should be.

Luckily for Katzenberg and Whitman, they have a better pitch here than just the name Quibi. According to Deadline, the two of them have lined up new shows from Sam Raimi, Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, and accomplished horror producer Jason Blum, and they’re all supposedly “so excited about doing something new” and to “be pioneers.” We don’t know what any of them are making, but Quibi is going to be based around mobile video, like what Snapchat and Instagram are doing, but it’ll be… different in some way. We don’t know much about that either, and it’s not really worth putting much stock in what Katzenberg and Whitman are saying because it’s all the same empty hype that everybody behind every new streaming service says.