18 ms·

The fall of Quibi: how did a starry $1.75B Netflix rival crash so fast?

219 points by MindGods 6y ago

TeaDrunk 6y ago
I have another question: how did anyone buy into Quibi? Extremely short film only works for the spontaneity of people’s individual creativity and not as a corporately produced product. See: vine, tiktok, etc. When it’s a corporate production it isn’t cool anymore.
- dav43 6y ago
  This is the real question. Who the hell thought this was a good investment?
  - spzb 6y ago
    The only explanation that make sense is that it was some kind of tax dodge
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  Meh, Youtube is making bank on short videos (often <10min, like Quibi's cap) and many of those aren't spontaneous bursts of creativity anymore, but highly produced products.
  - Crespyl 6y ago
    And many if not most of those YouTube creators are increasingly dissatisfied with Googles management and are looking for an alternative platform. It seems like such an obvious missed opportunity.
    - nmfisher 6y ago
      I hate to play arm-chair executive, but I have this nagging feeling you're right. Many (most?) YouTube content creators are making a pittance that's growing ever smaller by the day - $1.75bn can buy a huge amount of organic content. The obvious mistake was going all-in on the first (unproven) concept and leaving no time/budget to experiment with the latter. Smacks very much of the hubris of a entrenched, well-capitalized industry.
- jjoonathan 6y ago
  Didn't vine die and tiktok thrive because the biggest content creators were semi-pro, not individual spontaneous creatives, and tiktok provided better monetization options?
- JamesSwift 6y ago
  Almost every sketch comedy show in the US fits your criteria I think
- michaelt 6y ago
  > how did anyone buy into Quibi? Step 1: "I read in the Wall Street Journal that young people's attention spans are shorter these days, and that PewDiePie and Jake Paul make bank on Youtube with 10 minute videos." Step 2: "I feel my entertainment company was late to the party with things like YouTube, Netflix and TikTok. It would have been better if we'd got in at the ground floor." Step 3: "I'm told even if those youtube videos look spontaneous, they have scripts and production teams behind them." Step 4: "So Quibi is like that, but with celebrities? And other entertainment CEOs have already signed up to invest? Then count me in!"
- minimaxir 6y ago
  "The brainchild of the DreamWorks Animation cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg" is more-than-enough for VCs.
sgt101 6y ago
Some things work, other things don't work. You find out by trying. The thing is not to use $1bn to try.
- coldcode 6y ago
  Or pay $6M for a single minimal content.
  - C1sc0cat 6y ago
    $6M buys you a lot of David Attenborough for VO work.
- Barrin92 6y ago
  well they're essentially a media company, like netflix, and what really justifies the subscription you pay is original content exclusive to the platform. And there's no cheap way to produce content really in particular if you want to compete with the production value of modern TV shows.
wahlrus 6y ago
It seems like quibi raised the equivalent of the entire GDP of Belize without first verifying if literally anyone was interested in their offering. Classic silicon valley-style hubris.
- JumpCrisscross 6y ago
  > raised the equivalent of the entire GDP of Belize Which still turned out to be a water pistol to Apple, Amazon, Disney and Netflix’s carrier strike groups.
- gumby 6y ago
  Classic hollywood hubris, figuring enough spent on marketing and celebs will sell anything.
- jonny_eh 6y ago
  > Classic silicon valley-style hubris. Actually, rich human hubris. It's not unique to any single location.
- askafriend 6y ago
  This has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.
bobblywobbles 6y ago
The thought that buying short content from celebrities I think fails to realize that content is not desired if from people who have status, but content that is interesting in and of itself. The fact that the two spearheads are in Hollywood shows this as a viable hypothesis why other avenues were not considered. This is just another overly hyped "business" that wasn't meant to pan out.
- Eridrus 6y ago
  I think hits the nail on the head, the shows were just boring. It also plays into my hypothesis that writers in Hollywood are very underappreciated, because I don't know how else we get so much poorly written garbage, given the budgets involved.
- snarf21 6y ago
  Yeah, they miss the point. They can't compete against the virality of TikTok or YouTube on short video. People like streaming when they can binge. They are fine watching a show in chunks as they have time. But they want to be able to watch a bunch in a row if they have the time. Just not tested at all with users, a huge "build it and they will come" failure.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
knolax 6y ago
It's interesting because I saw a lot of ads for Quibi on Youtube and immediately assumed it was shovelware because that's pretty much the only thing that gets advertised on Youtube. I'm surprised that it was actually something that had a lot ofn investment behind it.
- shortsightedsid 6y ago
  Same here. The ads seemed really pushy and corporate-speak instead of organic and authentic. Put me off quite a bit actually
- catsarebetter 6y ago
  I really didn't like the ads b/c it gave me a sense that they were leveraging celebrity brands to expand their own, didn't feel organic or something new.
dawg- 6y ago
It's been discussed a lot, but i think the name is such a big part of it. Quibi is an impressively terrible name.
- chawco 6y ago
  I’m going to assume I wasn’t part of their target audience, given what I’m about to say, but the whole thing looks like a bunch of amateurs with a ton of money. First off you’re spot on with the name — what a terrible decision. Secondly because the name doesn’t tell you anything about who they are or what they do they needed to have advertising spots that got that across quickly. Except for some completely inexplicable reason they ran ads from a show about a mobile app, requiring you to watch for over a minute (!) before realizing the spot was for a show, not for some new app named Quibi. I literally saw their ads dozens and dozens of times before accidentally letting it run long enough to figure out what the hell it was. Did they recruit marketers from Microsoft or something? They’re the only other people I’ve seen capable of causing that degree of product confusion in marketing decisions. Next, where the hell did the focus on short form content come from? If anything the trend has been for longer and longer form content as seen by the success of HBO, where a shorter medium (cinema) has moved into a longer form medium (television) in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Given the focus on celebrities I’m sure I wasn’t their target audience, but what mobile-first audience WAS the target anyway? Why wasn’t YouTube serving their needs? Why weren’t there production companies making and promoting this form on YouTube and other platforms already? The mind boggles. The whole thing reads like a bunch of amateurs with too much money.
- hkmurakami 6y ago
  I wonder how much they paid their branding agency for this name
- jccalhoun 6y ago
  It could have been worse: https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/quibi-original-name-omakase-jeffrey-katzenberg.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/quibi-original-name-omakase-...
iwasakabukiman 6y ago
It's easy: All of the hype was manufactured. No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that made you think you others were.
- war1025 6y ago
  > No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that made you think you others were. My impression every time I heard about it was people weren't even buying into the "other people were excited" part.
tommy15 6y ago
Insane that Quibi spent $470 million on marketing in the first year and ranked outside the top 100 of free apps in the Apple store. Gone in 60 quibis... https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone-in-60-quibis https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone-in-60-quibis
spzb 6y ago
Their USP is anything but unique. There's nothing at all to stop Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc putting out ten minute chunks of content. They seem to have mistaken content production for content distribution. If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio and sell your content to one of the streaming services.
- TotempaaltJ 6y ago
  > If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio Yup, the kind of content (TV level series) they were attempting to put out there hasn't been perfected for short-form yet. They should've focused on that instead of leaving that problem to the content creators.
whack 6y ago
I see lot of comments along the lines of "silicon valley hubris", but how much of Quibi's $1.75B actually came from silicon valley? > In 2018, the startup (then called “New TV”) announced that it had raised $1 billion in funding. Among the initial investors were a who’s who of Hollywood studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Lionsgate, MGM, ITV and Entertainment One (now part of Hasbro). Tech investors include China’s Alibaba Group. That funding round was led by VC firm Madrone Capital Partners; other investors were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and John Malone’s Liberty Global. The Katzenberg-founded WndrCo investment vehicle also is a Quibi investor. It sounds like a bunch of old-school media companies and Hollywood studios trying to play Silicon Valley, and thinking they can build a Decacorn by spending lots of money and hiring famous celebrities, instead of doing small-scale MVPs and market-validation. There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea".
- raverbashing 6y ago
  Though, interestingly enough, Disney just threw money at the problem and came up with Disney+. Though to be fair there were probably a lot of lessons learned and hiring of very experienced people. Edit: my point is, yes, it's easy in hindsight to think it would be a success (and surely, a lot of things help). But HBO Go enjoys much less success (and has a lot of technical issues) Tidal was built to compete with Spotify, see where it went.
  - vxNsr 6y ago
    Disney+ isn’t a novel idea. All they really did was give everyone access to their entire library of videos. Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.
    - Crespyl 6y ago
erikig 6y ago
“With Katzenberg singularly blaming the pandemic”... If this wasn’t the best time to launch an online entertainment platform - I don’t know what would. With everyone unable to travel and consuming so much media the pandemic should have been a boost to their launch in my opinion.
- hellotomyrars 6y ago
  Which is probably why he should be singularly blaming the product. I'm sat at home. I don't want to watch video on my phone while sitting on the couch with my 60 inch television right there. (To be honest this is just one of the pile of problems of the product/service)
  - dublin 6y ago
    ^This^ is the reason that I have watched a grand total of less than a dozen movies on a computer or phone, ever. The experience just flat sucks.
- perardi 6y ago
  But it's all “mobile” content, seemingly to be watched on a commute. Who is going to watch video on a phone at home? Oh, wait, kids, kids love their tablet and phone video. Which they get for free. From YouTube. Or their parents already pay for Netflix. Or Disney+. Really, who exactly is this product for? It absolutely feels like Boomers trying to be where the kids are, but the kids are already well served by video game streamers.
danpalmer 6y ago
I have used most streaming networks at some point and have never heard of Quibi before today. It's possible I've seen the name and assumed it was another Chinese social network, but I really wasn't aware that a service with this video format existed. I live in the UK, maybe they aren't advertising in the UK? I do follow a lot of people in the US though and not heard any of them talking about it.
- 0x6c6f6c 6y ago
  In the US: I had no idea who they were.
- shrew 6y ago
  UK too. The BBC News site ran an article[0] back in April about this and that's how I picked up on it. Other US creators have mentioned in passing, but normally not very positively. This article actually incorrectly suggests Quibi is only accessible in US and Canada... > (Quibi is only available in the US and Canada) ...and no one I've spoken to has ever heard of it. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311
benjaminsuch 6y ago
From my point of view, the idea never got validated by actual users, but instead been pushed by investors and the founder(s) itself, thinking this would be a hit. Of course, due to a lot of marketing, they got a lot of users. Probably just to find out, that this is not what people expected or liked.
_sbrk 6y ago
Never name your company something that your customers can't pronounce. :-)
Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I am actually interested in trialing and maybe subscribing to Quibi—I could use a set of well-produced shows optimized for mobile viewing when I’m out and about. For context, I don’t subscribe to anything other video service, including Netflix—I prefer buying shows on iTunes without a subscription, even if I end up paying a bit more overall. But, I have zero interest in Quibi while I’m stuck at home due to COVID. Why would I watch a video on my phone when I have a 100 ft projector a button tap away? I just hope the service is still around when the world opens back up.
- lando2319 6y ago
  I believe they have added Chromecast support
  - Wowfunhappy 6y ago
    Thanks, but that defeats the point. If I’m at home, I’d rather watch a proper 30-60 minute show.
dig6x 6y ago
Quibi claimed to be competing with free and i think thats where they made their mistake. People on Youtube can leave a 10 minute vlog half way and still feel satisfied that they got their fill of quick stimulation. Quibi forces high effort engagement into a snippet of time where that's the last thing you want to be doing. Of course if they aren't competing with free, then they're competing with Netflix and honestly there is no USP on that side either. Its clear that they were exposed on both sides from the get go.
fasicle 6y ago
I tried Quibi for a few days when it was released (90 day free trial) but found the content to be pretty boring. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I tried a few different shows and nothing really kept me engaged like shows on Netflix.
hexmiles 6y ago
I'm (in theory) the target demographics for this app. I love short content (YouTube, podcast, web-comics, etc...) and always on the go. The main problem (for me) was the lack of content, for some reason they didn't tap in the YouTube ecosystem where there is plentiful of talent that specialize in the short (10 minute or less) format, Minutephysics is the first example that come to mind. Instead they went for the big-star tactics that really doesn't work. I watched all the show and, while some of them are good, the vast majority is only "meh". This plus the low number of show and episode, doesn't allow me to justify speeding the money of the subscription. It seem they tried to do Netflix "but short", instead of specializing in on-the-go entertainment. They don't even have podcast! However i really want a service with curated short content, but i want more than video! I'm also interested in podcast, articles (side note: can someone recommend summary "this-week-in-[argument]" site or channel?). I currently use YouTube, but a more curated multi-media platform (without ads) would be awesome and i would pay for it.
- mobilemidget 6y ago
  Was this service promoted outside the USA (other way put, should I have heard about this in EU?)? You at least heard of it, and used it.
  - hexmiles 6y ago
    I first became aware of it from a friend in the states, and i tried on my phone. Edit: i'm not aware of any marketing in EU, and also i needed to get through some hops to get the app
  - geerlingguy 6y ago
    I'm in the USA and I've heard the name once or twice ('some viral video series coming soon!' type ads), but didn't even realize it launched. Maybe I'm not the target demographic.
    - perardi 6y ago
      They also launched April 6, 2020, which was right smack in the middle of pandemic lockdowns. Not great timing to get eyes on your ads. Not the right mood for “here’s light and quick content for your commute!”
phire 6y ago
The fact that I've never heard of it until now makes me highly suspicious they failed to market the service correctly.
- elwell 6y ago
  I must have seen their (annoying, to me) ads over a 100 times already.
  - s1mon 6y ago
    Where? I've only managed to read about it in the media. Zero ads.
    - elwell 6y ago
      Either sling or hulu, forget...
  - phire 6y ago
    Yes, that was what I was suspicious about. They flooded their target market (which I'm obviously outside of) with hundreds of low effort ads which probably turned people off it. And it seems like they did next to nothing to build their brand outside of that targeted advertising.
jdxcode 6y ago
I could not believe they wanted $5/month WITH ads!
cududa 6y ago
Their The Most Dangerous game had a lot of potential, but I want to watch it on my 70” TV, not my 5” phone screen. I know they recently enabled AirPlay, but seriously, if they would’ve just launched with a smart TV app they might’ve been better off
KoftaBob 6y ago
Making it mobile only in the beginning was a big mistake, I think they overestimated how many younger people would want to watch on their phones with no option to watch on their TV. It tries to be tiktok and netflix at the same time, without being good at either vertical.
pkulak 6y ago
This is a really funny video take on the whole situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc
- binarysolo 6y ago
  That guy's amazing (and has a great take on the whole issue).
- SilasX 6y ago
  Thanks! That’s a great overview! (and I say that as someone that generally doesn’t like getting journalism through videos.)
elcomet 6y ago
It started in april 2020, ie 3 months ago. I think it's presumptuous to say that it "failed" already. It's just below its own target. Lot ot things can still happen. They can release a show that'll become viral and bring them million of subscribers. But of course there are some very strange decisions: - Mobile-only is weird. Why not make mobile a priority, but people are used to watch shows on their TV or PC. And you cannot watch things with multiple other people. Even with one person, it's not really practical. - Did not allow screenshot: for a mobile only, it's strange, they failed to understand something about the internet. Heck, they could have made a button to annotate and share a screenshot on social media in-app since they're in mobile-only. That would have been something people are used to. But at least allow people to share the content they like. You're just forbidding free advertisment.
- perardi 6y ago
  They at least seem to be rethinking the “only on mobile” thing. You can now play on a TV using a Chromecast or AirPlay. Still no dedicated smart TV or streaming stick apps, though. https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-use-Chromecast-or-Apple-AirPlay-with-my-Quibi-app- https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-...
  - Terretta 6y ago
    Compared to web pages, video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video subscription, so 720p (or, say, 360p for iOS 14 PIP mode) yields significantly different cost basis. The only on mobile thing may have been necessary for the business model.
    - carlosdp 6y ago
      I very much doubt they made that decision based on bandwidth costs though. They've burned a billion dollars already, don't think they are thinking about margins much at the moment.
    - donavanm 6y ago
      > video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video subscription Maybe "compared to web pages". But very skeptical it's a meaningful cost compared to production or subscription prices. Even going with a third party CDN you're probably not paying more than ¢1/GB of transfer. For 720P h.264 that's about about 2GB, or 2¢, per hour of content transferred. How many pennies per month do you need before it's a meaningful portion of the $7 subscription price?
rogerdickey 6y ago
Flagged, as this is clickbait. Quibi has not failed or "crashed", it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets.
- zemo 6y ago
  From the article: > while it’s too soon to declare the end of Quibi, it’s still worth asking: is the promise of the quick bite already over? And what went so wrong? it doesn't say "it failed" it says their adoption has collapsed. "it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets" is just another way of saying their numbers are bad, which is ... all the article is saying. Doesn't seem even remotely close to warranting a flag.
  - nwsm 6y ago
    The title says it crashed.
- mellosouls 6y ago
  Flagging is an overreaction I think. It's unfriendly but in depth, and unfortunately these titles are the way of the world.
rvz 6y ago
It's quite simple why Quibi failed. They couldn't retain users during when the lockdown measures were in place in April, which they betted heavily on. If they couldn't gain those users at that time, then they would be finished as soon as the lockdown was being eased. I guess that a mobile only, 10 minute video platform wasn't appealing to those users who bought into the original hype of purchasing this service and later switched back to the good old Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney+. It had no chance and was dead before it was even born. The fact that all of Hollywood was backing this and throwing $1.7 billion is at most the top charts of product failures and part of the greatest hits of VC hype trains I've seen so far. As the comments here already have mentioned, this can be best described as a high speed expensive train crash for investors.
- acdha 6y ago
  Mobile only - and it reportedly didn’t support sharing, which would explain why I never saw _anyone_ talking about it. Installing an app is a barrier to adoption and they intentionally blocked the most common way to get over that by letting people on social media convince their friends there’s something worth watching.
- SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
  I'd argue that the lockdown was (and potentially, unfortunately, will be again) a better time for standard long shows, someone could binge 10 hours in a row.
LockAndLol 6y ago
They spent 1.75$bn in 3 months??? If they spent that kind of money on original series on a worldwide CC license, spammed the shit out of it on social media and provided integrations with every video platform in existence, they would've achieved much more than whatever it is they were trying to achieve.
ogre_codes 6y ago
They lost me at $4.99/ month with advertising and $6.99/ month without. Since I can't stand video advertising, this costs just as much as Disney+ for an absolutely unknown content library. Comparing them to Disney+ isn't remotely fair though because Disney+ contains a huge library of content and people know exactly what they are getting. Which leave's me scratching my head. So lets look at another company trying to get into the media game at the ground floor. The Apple TV+ launch was similarly a bit starved for known media properties and went with a fairly similar buy the celebrity sort of route into the business. That's why they have Oprah and Steven Spielberg titles featured prominently. It's why they have Foundation coming on Apple TV+. And Apple TV+ is $4.99/ month commercial free and (for many), a full year of free content. Even with comparable talent at launch, lower pricing and more generous terms, Apple's offering isn't exactly blowing the doors off the market either. (I kind of think it's doing Ok, just not making Netflix or DIS sweat too much). If you want to get into media streaming right now, you need to either have a strong existing brand, or you need to be willing to lose a lot of money for a long time building up a catalog of trusted franchises.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
admax88q 6y ago
> Quibi Who?
zachware 6y ago
When I think of Quibi I think of the companies that I used to see set up "activations" in this one space on Abbot Kinney in Venice (LA). They were always new social apps or other things that received funding from outside the tech sphere and figured their best bet was to setup a thing on a shopping street. Money != product even if you have nearly $2B dollars.
hogFeast 6y ago
Jeferry Katzenberg is way way overrated. I believed the shtick about him being behind Disney's animation success. I held Dreamworks Animation, admittedly the buyout was a fair price, but he got paid a ton of money for fairly mixed performance. Shrek, Kung Fu Panda definitely decent franchises but he piled the profit from these films into a ton of shit that didn't work (and his own pocket, somehow he is a billionaire). But yeah, this had failure written all over it. I think the concept is basically fine...you don't know until you try it. But pouring a billion dollars into this was fucking lunacy (and the fact that Katzenberg invested too, shows that he is genuinely just not very good at his job). Like you prove the concept with far lower levels of capital...the issue was that the product was dogshit, not that you needed a billion dollars to make it work.
frsandstone 6y ago
This is a good time for a reminder about the startup journey. Quibi is in the "Trough of Sorrow" which is NORMAL. https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough-of-sorrow/ https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-...
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  Suggesting they are in a trough implies that there was an initial bump of enthusiasm which seems completely absent. There was a bit of advertising driven early uptake, but it didn't stick at all. I'm not even sure I'd consider a celebrity backed company that was backed by nearly $2B out of the gate a startup in the normal sense.
- snowwrestler 6y ago
  The problem with Quibi is that they never saw that initial bump. They went straight from launch to the trough.
ekanes 6y ago
I'm sure there are counter-examples, and this is totally gut feeling, but it never seems like things that start with Q work out! Never invest in Q.
mason55 6y ago
> Quibi’s signature “Turnstyle” technology, which allowed content to flow from portrait view to landscape and back again seamlessly on your phone, is tied up in a patent lawsuit with a deep-pocketed hedge fund. Seems like this minimizes the seriousness a bit. The deep pocketed hedge fund is Elliott Management and they are basically gunning for the whole company. They're working with the original patent holder and bankrolling the law suit process. Elliott (Paul Singer) are not stupid and they don't play nice. If they are stepping into bankroll this lawsuit then they obviously see something and the lawsuit should be considered an existential threat to Quibi. Singer strikes fear into sovereign nations so a couple media execs are going to be small potatoes.
- quxpar 6y ago
  Wait... they did what? I didn't realize they had such a terrible idea at the core of their business.... > Every show (and ad) is filmed and edited in both portrait and landscape. Creators upload two video files and a separate audio file, which are then synced and streamed simultaneously to your phone, so the video instantly switches when you rotate the device. I already dread getting the sides chopped off my movies due to aspect ratio confusion, are they seriously offering a platform where I'm always missing out on one half of the footage? Maybe it's the ol' OCD kicking in, but I imagine constantly switching back and forth to try to figure out the 'right' angle to look at a scene from. It seems deeply unpleasant.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - 1123581321 6y ago
    You don’t miss too much. When you watch it you learn the typical cuts. Landscape only works most of the time, with portrait if you want to see two characters standing close to one another in more detail. Sometimes portrait shows multiple shots at once, which is neat. There are supposedly some shows that add hidden information (e.g. portrait shows a character’s phone screen) but I never countered it. I actually wish the cuts differed more by showing angles from totally different cameras or being colored differently. It would be expensive but seriously groundbreaking. One day.
jariel 6y ago
This is startup hubris because: 1) they are trying to innovate along a few vectors at the same time, choose one. 2) Political leaders not highly engaged with the details of the experience. Whitman scaled EBay she did not start it. 3) You have a pile of cash, and tons of people looking to cash in huge by grabbing some of the pie for easy money. That one of the content buyers gave his $6M for voice overs is definitely a scandal - this could only happen in a hyper politicised world.
mizay7 6y ago
Quibi seems like a neat idea but is being run very strangely for what it is: its being run like old media when the point is that it's new media. -where is the trial option for a new media format? -where are the samples of series on YouTube? -where are my targeted ads on YouTube that point me to those samples? I saw enough stuff about Quibi on websites where I get my TV and movie discussions to be interested, but nothing in places where I make decisions about what web content i consume to even consider dealing with the friction of a new app and a new subscription.
- seem_2211 6y ago
  There were a ton of Quibi ads on Tik Tok. But it doesn't have the virality and originality, and honestly I don't think it ever will. Big production budgets and incredible story lines are something that Hollywood does a really good job of (and we've seen that come to TV over the past 10 years). But the sort of Tik Toks and Youtube videos that I like are pretty basic, and would be laughed out of the room as boring. It's like comparing a newspaper article with a novel. They're different products that do different jobs.
chadlavi 6y ago
It had no strong differentiator and it had a stupid name. As a consumer I just dismissed it as soon as I first heard it mentioned. It seems I wasn't the only one!
diogenescynic 6y ago
Wrong question. Why did anyone think it would succeed? There was zero organic demand for this and it just seemed like some ill-conceived VC backed company that was trying to be the next TikTok. How did it crash so fast? Because it tried to solve something that no one cared about and didn't offer any real meaningful value--their launched 'shows' were garbage quality. Also, Meg Whitman... she ran Ebay and HP into the ground. Why pick her to lead a startup or all people? This was doomed from inception.
ponker 6y ago
Most companies are destined to fail. If you invest $1.75 billion logically, you invest $1m in 10 companies, then after a year take the best-performing of those and invest another $5m in each, take the next three and invest $1m more to give them another year, and let the bottom three fail. A year later you see if any of the middle three have done well, put $5m into those, and $50m into the top performers of the A-list batch. In doing so you will find yourself investing more money in the stronger-performing companies and overall you are unlikely to lose massive amounts of money (you will only be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that are already very successful, so even if they don't achieve what you wanted them to, you will at least be able to recover some of your investment). Or, you can just go and bet $1.75b on rolling a six and sit there scratching your head when it doesn't work out.
russellbeattie 6y ago
There are a lot of startups which make you question your sanity, but they end up working out because your initial assumptions or understanding of the market are completely wrong. I've been caught enough times over the years to give the benefit of the doubt to new companies. That said, this is not one of those times. Quibi's business model as it stands now is batshit insane. The fact that it hasn't taken off has given me a deep sense of relief that the guy in the mirror is not the one who is barking mad. Personally, my guess is that it's some sort of Russian oligarch money laundering scheme. Or something akin to a modern day equivalent of The Producers where they make money from total failure.
bcrescimanno 6y ago
There’s a reason that the phrase, “Content is King” is so prevalent: it’s a fact. Like many, I saw dozens of ads for Quibi (many of them on YouTube) and the entire campaign was centered around selling me on the concept of short-form content—-something I found hilarious on YouTube since anyone who frequents YouTube is probably already pretty sold on that concept. At no point was I given any indication of what I could watch. Every ad left me totally disengaged because I was either left to guess at what they might have or to assume that their library must be pretty shit if they aren’t going to talk about it. I worked at Netflix when the company began the idea of a “Netflix Original.” Everyone points to House of Cards as the first (and, in terms of Netflix-produced content, it was) but there was a lesser known first original called “Lillyhammer.” You didn’t hear about it because it was literally dipping the toes into the water of what it meant to “own” content rather that just license it. It wasn’t a signature piece of content we could build a brand around. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were the big ones and they came 6 and 9 months later respectively. They were “signature” shows that set the tone of what Netflix originals were all about. I remember the lead Product Manager and I sitting together and discussing whether we should include a promotional photo of one of the characters from House of Cards giving the camera the middle finger in our main experience. We knew that parents and conservative groups might be upset by it being right there in our UI; but, we also knew the tone we wanted to set for our content. We put it in. The content drove our marketing. It was important that people get on board with the idea of “Netflix Originals.” But it was more important that the content spoke for itself. In Quibi’s case, they need content they can showcase that speak for itself and gets people on the platform. No one will care if it’s “short form” or “long form” as long as it’s GOOD.
- emeraldd 6y ago
  This a thousand times over! WTH is a Quibi and why should I care? That's the question I always asked after one of those commercials. It was like watching someone trying to sell a blank notebook with a fancy cover that wouldn't take ink ...
tgflynn 6y ago
Maybe because they bought a lot of stupid and annoying commercials that made no sense to anyone.
npunt 6y ago
Quibi saddled a weird new idea for media to a traditional paywall streaming service business model. Irrespective of anything else, that's a bad start. Traditional media subscriptions work because you know what you're getting - sit down, watch a show that they offer. There's no ambiguity about whether you'll like the sitting down and watching part, it's only down to whether you'll like the particular show. For a consumer its very low risk. Quibi's medium is new and exploratory, and you don't really know what you're getting both in viewing experience and the content itself as they leveraged no existing IP. If you don't know what you're getting, and nobody else knows because its new, paywalling is a terrible idea. I'm sure there's a way to make bite-sized media pay for itself, but the path for that is probably as an offshoot of a social app like TikTok or a niche community play that slowly expands out, not some big Hollywood standalone spectacle.
sjg007 6y ago
It should be free with ad support. Five minutes of laughs followed by a commercial interlude sort of gets you in the standard sitcom world anyway. Then maybe add a premium payment option.
Causality1 6y ago
People won't pay a subscription for short-form content. Back in the day cartoons came at the beginning of movies because nobody would go to a theater for a fifteen minute show. Today short-form content is supported by advertising, be it on YouTube or Facebook or TikTok.
- ponker 6y ago
  Spotify?
jedberg 6y ago
I knew as soon as I heard about Quibi that it would fail. A few reasons: - Mobile first short content has already been tried multiple times by the big players and failed to find a market fit. The only one who has succeeded is YouTube, and they're free. - Original content only. You can't start a streaming service with just original content. You need a library of content, which means licensing existing content, or having a library already (HBOMax, CBS All Access, Peacock, etc. all have back catalogs from their parent companies). - Meg Whitman. I worked for Meg at eBay/PayPal. She was brilliant. But her expertise is growing a successful enterprise, not coming from behind. Look at her two main gigs -- eBay/PayPal, where she came into an already profitable enterprise and made it explode, and HPE, where she came into a failing enterprise and made it worse.
techlaw 6y ago
An article about one of their shows ('Murder House') told me all I needed to know about Quibi. Our culture does not need to trivialize murder or revictimize victims of crime more than we already do, thank you. No amount of quality content could overcome my revulsion to use a service which features this: "There's a new television show in the works that combines all your favorite things: home renovation projects and true crime stories [...] all about renovation houses where murders took place."[1] [1] https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called-murder-house-flip-will-be-your-new-obsession/ https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called...
- HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
  I take it you've never watched Investigation Discovery, aka, The Murder Channel? https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/ https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/ One of my favorite channels, BTW :-)
  - Marsymars 6y ago
    Irrespective of the OP's stance, I just don't get true crime media. I've tried a few of them, and they hold my interest about as well as CSI/NCIS, or watching a weather channel for a foreign country.
  - techlaw 6y ago
    No, I haven't. And rather than try to infer your implication(s) about Investigation Discovery I will ask directly: - Do they treat murder as a venue for entertainment? - Are they seemingly indifferent to the impact on victims? Because, if it was not clear, those were the points I was trying to convey about the unhealthy aspects of Quibi's show.
    - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
      Well, they're definitely not indifferent to the victims. ID has a bunch of different shows, but a lot of them involve interviews with victims interspersed with the story but they certainly seem sympathetic to their situation. As far as it being a "venue for entertainment," well, the basis of the channel is crime stories, primarily murders and it would be a stretch to say that it's for educational purposes, so...
dhosek 6y ago
T-Mobile offers it free with cell phone service. I'm still not interested enough to bother with it. Apparently there's a celebrity fan-made remake of The Princess Bride that's going up on the service. I'm a little curious to see it, but it's still not enough to bother with downloading an app to use a service I get for free.
pkamb 6y ago
Instagram Stories and Snapchat both prove that there absolutely is a huge demand for mobile-only portrait short-form video content. Maybe not "produced TV shows" in that format, as Quibi seemed to be pushing. But I'd much prefer watching vloggers/YouTubers/Twitch/etc. in that format rather than in a landscape video on my phone.
Apofis 6y ago
The name sounds like some chinese app that I see spammed on YouTube ads all the timed and a paid subscription at this time for a vine-like TV streaming service? HULU was free for ages. Disney+ just came out. Fail.
loraa 6y ago
Celebrities are so full of themselves that the thought people would give a shit if they were doing something other than amusing us. So arrogant.
dirkg 6y ago
Netflix rival ??!! Only in the wild imaginings and ramblings of its founders. A stupid concept endlessly hyped by billionaire founder and vapid celebs, anti-consumer and useless, and having the nerve to blame Covid-19 for the failure of your idea - the hubris and arrogance is truly breathtaking.
newbie789 6y ago
I don't mean to sound negative, but I thought from the original announcement that this model was absurd. Yes, people like watching content on their phones, but the novelty of that (for me) was the freedom that came from being locked in to my TV or PC. Freedom was the thing that made me welcome YouTube to my phone. When I read that Quibi was going to lock customers into a single format I literally laughed out loud. It seemed to me that maybe the founders consulted a handful of teenagers and got pranked in the process. I installed Quibi a while back, got the 90 day trial, and uninstalled it in under an hour after realizing I couldn't cast it to my FireStick. >...the company is in talks with Amazon Fire and Roku to bring the app to TV. This is even funnier. If they had done this much, much earlier they would probably be in much better shape. The fact that they're doing it now indicates that this is the case. Again, I cannot stress how funny it is that at some point in some meeting, somebody pitched something akin to "You know what people don't care about/hate? Choice." and that flew. It's like something from a Christopher Guest movie.
- CPUstring 6y ago
  Quibi has all the hallmarks of _corporate_ groupthink. "You know what the kids like? They like phones and Joe Jonas, my daughter won't stop talking about him." These things are made by executives and leaders that are so type-A they don't actually look at their phones because they're barking out orders to format a PowerPoint slide, and then instead of just asking their kid if they'd do something (sit down for ten minutes to watch Sophie Turner) they get a big panel of people (who sign up to do panel studies) and ask them. When big media companies make apps, it's like when developers go to the edge of a town and build an urban hellscape edge city. When will media executives realize they can't Robert Moses their way into the FAANG?
dzonga 6y ago
no boots on the ground is why it failed. saw many ads on mobile reddit, about quibi. and even was a massive turn off. they made the same mistake, netflix is doing now: not investing in good content creators i.e writers, producers etc. have a home run of a show, then people will migrate to your platform. same playbook, disney+ used.
nathanvanfleet 6y ago
To me Quibi was immediately a sort of joke. I saw the video ads about a pilot watching Quibi or something and kind of ignored it. I knew what the platform was sort of but I never checked it out. It's kind of like the reality of any app-store platform, you have to have a killer app. In this case it would be a video series that can't be found anywhere other than Quibi that makes them have to check it out. Maybe there was one that I don't know about, but I feel like their ads should have been telling me where to find what I already wanted instead of just trying to entice me to check it out because they paid someone to pretend to be a pilot who is checking it out.
whatgoodisaroad 6y ago
It's increasingly looking like an unpopular opinion, but Quibi to me seems like an obviously sound business strategy. It's seemingly skating where the puck is going through numerous media consumption trends. At worst, this short-term failure seems like the failure of Google Wave, namely that it failed by being too far ahead of its time (and it's ideas will be cannibalized into however many yet-to-be-invented media products). This doesn't detract from the pleasure I have at seeing it fail, mainly because of the way they wantonly plagiarized Everything Is Terrible with "Memory Hole". But, to generalize, I think a lot of people have lots of different reasons to feel animosity towards Quibi, and we're all collectively misconstruing that animosity as identification of a weak business model (which I don't believe it is).
- maps7 6y ago
  I agree. It's a good model but without killer content it won't gain much traction. Finding that killer content will be hard because it's new. It's not going to be the same killer content that Netflix has.
drumhead 6y ago
As always with failures like this, it was the answer to a question no one asked.
DeonPenny 6y ago
Dang didn't this just come out. I just learned about this app. I thought it was just really small, iterating its business, and just blew up. I didn't even know they made startups like this anymore.
jhfdbkofdcho 6y ago
The new Reno 911 was really good. In that it is exactly what I wanted (more Reno 912), but i had to watch it on my phone so whatever. There were some moments where you could rotate the phone to watch a different angle but it wasn’t essential. Maybe they should try putting up more Reno 911, couldn’t hurt.
ibdf 6y ago
I tried Quibi and I did not even finish the free trial. The reason being, is that it doesn't know what it is. Quibi was great for short shows that are made in short format... but it wanted me to watch a long show in a short format - which it just means that now instead of watching one episode for 30 mins I need to watch 6 episodes for 5 mins. I also think their timing was an issue.. because with this pandemic people have more time to watch shows, long shows, movies, and I honestly don't think many people would pick Quibi when there are so many more options with so much more content.
mrnobody_67 6y ago
Whatifi is way better.... interactive movie games that you watch with your friends.
ryanmarsh 6y ago
Because the terrible name?
mrnobody_67 6y ago
Success is almost inversely proportional to money raised pre-launch.... Magic Leap is another example. Theranos. Top 10 ICOs all failures with no users despite $100m+ each.
blhack 6y ago
Some thoughts: 1) The name is awful. Nothing about "quibi" tells me that it is a streaming platform. "you tube" "net flix" "vimeo" etc. These are all obviously video platforms, and the name indicates that. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but the name definitely is not helping. 2) There is no way I am going to watch anything longer than 30 seconds on my phone unless I absolutely have to. Mobile data overages are expensive. I'm not going to risk my wifi cutting out, and eating through my monthly data to watch reno 911. How I would fix this: 1) Change the name. "Mob-ix" is a portmanteau of "mobile and flix". Change the name to mobix. 2) Create a website where I can watch this content. 3) Post some of the content on youtube, twitter, instagram, etc. That's where you supposed users are. Go to them. 4) Make this content available on amazon video, itunes, etc. as well. I'll pay you for reno 911. It seems like they're trying to make a new genre of video, that's cool, and maybe this will stick, but you need to convince people that this is valuable and that they should not only pay a new service, but invest into a new paradigm. I think that by posting some of this on the existing places where people are watching short-form video is how you do that.
zem 6y ago
honestly, the minute i saw "mobile only" i pretty much lost interest in quibi, and in fact i had entirely forgotten that they existed. i'm glad the guardian called that out as one of the factors contributing to their demise, and would love to see the entire trend of mobile-only apps and services go the way of the dodo.
deleted 6y ago
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jccalhoun 6y ago
I am not the market for this. I live less than a mile from work (when I am going into work...). However, some of the reviews I have seen have argued that some of the shows didn't even use the format well and seemed to have been reedited from traditional shows. That makes it less appealing for me. Then there are also rumors that because the "episodes" are so short that they can be filmed using largely non-union crew which, if true, is pretty shitty. I have looked but I haven't found anything more than tweets claiming this though.
dragonsngoblins 6y ago
I had literally never even heard of Quibi before I saw this headline
cvburgess 6y ago
A thing I don't think enough people are talking about is that this launched in the era of stay-at-home but it was designed for the on-the-go person. The folks that want to watch super short-form content optimized for a smart phone are the folks on the subway or on a lunch break but now most of the world is at home surrounded by large screens and high-quality, well known content so Quibi has nearly no appeal. Give it a year ( if they can make it that long ) and I think you'll see them align with a larger on-the-go audience but at the current price point with all new, smartphone-optimized content they just don't fit into a market where people have access all day to TVs and are craving comforting, familiar favorites in juxtaposition to a world that is full of change and generally full of anxiety.

219 points by MindGods 6y ago

I have another question: how did anyone buy into Quibi? Extremely short film only works for the spontaneity of people’s individual creativity and not as a corporately produced product. See: vine, tiktok, etc. When it’s a corporate production it isn’t cool anymore.

dav43 6y ago
This is the real question. Who the hell thought this was a good investment?
- spzb 6y ago
  The only explanation that make sense is that it was some kind of tax dodge
TotempaaltJ 6y ago
Meh, Youtube is making bank on short videos (often <10min, like Quibi's cap) and many of those aren't spontaneous bursts of creativity anymore, but highly produced products.
- Crespyl 6y ago
  And many if not most of those YouTube creators are increasingly dissatisfied with Googles management and are looking for an alternative platform. It seems like such an obvious missed opportunity.
  - nmfisher 6y ago
    I hate to play arm-chair executive, but I have this nagging feeling you're right. Many (most?) YouTube content creators are making a pittance that's growing ever smaller by the day - $1.75bn can buy a huge amount of organic content. The obvious mistake was going all-in on the first (unproven) concept and leaving no time/budget to experiment with the latter. Smacks very much of the hubris of a entrenched, well-capitalized industry.
jjoonathan 6y ago
Didn't vine die and tiktok thrive because the biggest content creators were semi-pro, not individual spontaneous creatives, and tiktok provided better monetization options?
JamesSwift 6y ago
Almost every sketch comedy show in the US fits your criteria I think
michaelt 6y ago
> how did anyone buy into Quibi? Step 1: "I read in the Wall Street Journal that young people's attention spans are shorter these days, and that PewDiePie and Jake Paul make bank on Youtube with 10 minute videos." Step 2: "I feel my entertainment company was late to the party with things like YouTube, Netflix and TikTok. It would have been better if we'd got in at the ground floor." Step 3: "I'm told even if those youtube videos look spontaneous, they have scripts and production teams behind them." Step 4: "So Quibi is like that, but with celebrities? And other entertainment CEOs have already signed up to invest? Then count me in!"
minimaxir 6y ago
"The brainchild of the DreamWorks Animation cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg" is more-than-enough for VCs.

sgt101 6y ago

Some things work, other things don't work. You find out by trying. The thing is not to use $1bn to try.

coldcode 6y ago
Or pay $6M for a single minimal content.
- C1sc0cat 6y ago
  $6M buys you a lot of David Attenborough for VO work.
Barrin92 6y ago
well they're essentially a media company, like netflix, and what really justifies the subscription you pay is original content exclusive to the platform. And there's no cheap way to produce content really in particular if you want to compete with the production value of modern TV shows.

wahlrus 6y ago

It seems like quibi raised the equivalent of the entire GDP of Belize without first verifying if literally anyone was interested in their offering. Classic silicon valley-style hubris.

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
> raised the equivalent of the entire GDP of Belize Which still turned out to be a water pistol to Apple, Amazon, Disney and Netflix’s carrier strike groups.
gumby 6y ago
Classic hollywood hubris, figuring enough spent on marketing and celebs will sell anything.
jonny_eh 6y ago
> Classic silicon valley-style hubris. Actually, rich human hubris. It's not unique to any single location.
askafriend 6y ago
This has nothing to do with Silicon Valley.

bobblywobbles 6y ago

The thought that buying short content from celebrities I think fails to realize that content is not desired if from people who have status, but content that is interesting in and of itself. The fact that the two spearheads are in Hollywood shows this as a viable hypothesis why other avenues were not considered. This is just another overly hyped "business" that wasn't meant to pan out.

Eridrus 6y ago
I think hits the nail on the head, the shows were just boring. It also plays into my hypothesis that writers in Hollywood are very underappreciated, because I don't know how else we get so much poorly written garbage, given the budgets involved.
snarf21 6y ago
Yeah, they miss the point. They can't compete against the virality of TikTok or YouTube on short video. People like streaming when they can binge. They are fine watching a show in chunks as they have time. But they want to be able to watch a bunch in a row if they have the time. Just not tested at all with users, a huge "build it and they will come" failure.
deleted 6y ago
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knolax 6y ago

It's interesting because I saw a lot of ads for Quibi on Youtube and immediately assumed it was shovelware because that's pretty much the only thing that gets advertised on Youtube. I'm surprised that it was actually something that had a lot ofn investment behind it.

shortsightedsid 6y ago
Same here. The ads seemed really pushy and corporate-speak instead of organic and authentic. Put me off quite a bit actually
catsarebetter 6y ago
I really didn't like the ads b/c it gave me a sense that they were leveraging celebrity brands to expand their own, didn't feel organic or something new.

dawg- 6y ago

It's been discussed a lot, but i think the name is such a big part of it. Quibi is an impressively terrible name.

chawco 6y ago
I’m going to assume I wasn’t part of their target audience, given what I’m about to say, but the whole thing looks like a bunch of amateurs with a ton of money. First off you’re spot on with the name — what a terrible decision. Secondly because the name doesn’t tell you anything about who they are or what they do they needed to have advertising spots that got that across quickly. Except for some completely inexplicable reason they ran ads from a show about a mobile app, requiring you to watch for over a minute (!) before realizing the spot was for a show, not for some new app named Quibi. I literally saw their ads dozens and dozens of times before accidentally letting it run long enough to figure out what the hell it was. Did they recruit marketers from Microsoft or something? They’re the only other people I’ve seen capable of causing that degree of product confusion in marketing decisions. Next, where the hell did the focus on short form content come from? If anything the trend has been for longer and longer form content as seen by the success of HBO, where a shorter medium (cinema) has moved into a longer form medium (television) in order to tell the stories they wanted to tell. Given the focus on celebrities I’m sure I wasn’t their target audience, but what mobile-first audience WAS the target anyway? Why wasn’t YouTube serving their needs? Why weren’t there production companies making and promoting this form on YouTube and other platforms already? The mind boggles. The whole thing reads like a bunch of amateurs with too much money.
hkmurakami 6y ago
I wonder how much they paid their branding agency for this name
jccalhoun 6y ago
It could have been worse: https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/quibi-original-name-omakase-jeffrey-katzenberg.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/06/quibi-original-name-omakase-...

iwasakabukiman 6y ago

It's easy: All of the hype was manufactured. No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that made you think you others were.

war1025 6y ago
> No one was actually excited for it, there were just a ton of articles that made you think you others were. My impression every time I heard about it was people weren't even buying into the "other people were excited" part.

tommy15 6y ago

Insane that Quibi spent $470 million on marketing in the first year and ranked outside the top 100 of free apps in the Apple store. Gone in 60 quibis... https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone-in-60-quibis https://notboring.substack.com/p/gone-in-60-quibis

spzb 6y ago

Their USP is anything but unique. There's nothing at all to stop Netflix, YouTube, Amazon etc putting out ten minute chunks of content. They seem to have mistaken content production for content distribution. If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio and sell your content to one of the streaming services.

TotempaaltJ 6y ago
> If short videos are what people want, then act as a production studio Yup, the kind of content (TV level series) they were attempting to put out there hasn't been perfected for short-form yet. They should've focused on that instead of leaving that problem to the content creators.

whack 6y ago

I see lot of comments along the lines of "silicon valley hubris", but how much of Quibi's $1.75B actually came from silicon valley? > In 2018, the startup (then called “New TV”) announced that it had raised $1 billion in funding. Among the initial investors were a who’s who of Hollywood studios: Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom, AT&T’s WarnerMedia, Lionsgate, MGM, ITV and Entertainment One (now part of Hasbro). Tech investors include China’s Alibaba Group. That funding round was led by VC firm Madrone Capital Partners; other investors were Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan and John Malone’s Liberty Global. The Katzenberg-founded WndrCo investment vehicle also is a Quibi investor. It sounds like a bunch of old-school media companies and Hollywood studios trying to play Silicon Valley, and thinking they can build a Decacorn by spending lots of money and hiring famous celebrities, instead of doing small-scale MVPs and market-validation. There's a lot of non-techies outside of SV who seem to think that developers/designers/product-managers are just doing the menial plumbing of building out other people's ideas, and that anyone can do the same thing if they just had access to capital. Maybe this debacle will convince them that there's more to building a successful business than just capital and "an idea".

raverbashing 6y ago
Though, interestingly enough, Disney just threw money at the problem and came up with Disney+. Though to be fair there were probably a lot of lessons learned and hiring of very experienced people. Edit: my point is, yes, it's easy in hindsight to think it would be a success (and surely, a lot of things help). But HBO Go enjoys much less success (and has a lot of technical issues) Tidal was built to compete with Spotify, see where it went.
- vxNsr 6y ago
  Disney+ isn’t a novel idea. All they really did was give everyone access to their entire library of videos. Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.
  - Crespyl 6y ago

erikig 6y ago

“With Katzenberg singularly blaming the pandemic”... If this wasn’t the best time to launch an online entertainment platform - I don’t know what would. With everyone unable to travel and consuming so much media the pandemic should have been a boost to their launch in my opinion.

hellotomyrars 6y ago
Which is probably why he should be singularly blaming the product. I'm sat at home. I don't want to watch video on my phone while sitting on the couch with my 60 inch television right there. (To be honest this is just one of the pile of problems of the product/service)
- dublin 6y ago
  ^This^ is the reason that I have watched a grand total of less than a dozen movies on a computer or phone, ever. The experience just flat sucks.
perardi 6y ago
But it's all “mobile” content, seemingly to be watched on a commute. Who is going to watch video on a phone at home? Oh, wait, kids, kids love their tablet and phone video. Which they get for free. From YouTube. Or their parents already pay for Netflix. Or Disney+. Really, who exactly is this product for? It absolutely feels like Boomers trying to be where the kids are, but the kids are already well served by video game streamers.

danpalmer 6y ago

I have used most streaming networks at some point and have never heard of Quibi before today. It's possible I've seen the name and assumed it was another Chinese social network, but I really wasn't aware that a service with this video format existed. I live in the UK, maybe they aren't advertising in the UK? I do follow a lot of people in the US though and not heard any of them talking about it.

0x6c6f6c 6y ago
In the US: I had no idea who they were.
shrew 6y ago
UK too. The BBC News site ran an article[0] back in April about this and that's how I picked up on it. Other US creators have mentioned in passing, but normally not very positively. This article actually incorrectly suggests Quibi is only accessible in US and Canada... > (Quibi is only available in the US and Canada) ...and no one I've spoken to has ever heard of it. [0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311 https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-52193311

benjaminsuch 6y ago

From my point of view, the idea never got validated by actual users, but instead been pushed by investors and the founder(s) itself, thinking this would be a hit. Of course, due to a lot of marketing, they got a lot of users. Probably just to find out, that this is not what people expected or liked.

_sbrk 6y ago

Never name your company something that your customers can't pronounce. :-)

Wowfunhappy 6y ago

I am actually interested in trialing and maybe subscribing to Quibi—I could use a set of well-produced shows optimized for mobile viewing when I’m out and about. For context, I don’t subscribe to anything other video service, including Netflix—I prefer buying shows on iTunes without a subscription, even if I end up paying a bit more overall. But, I have zero interest in Quibi while I’m stuck at home due to COVID. Why would I watch a video on my phone when I have a 100 ft projector a button tap away? I just hope the service is still around when the world opens back up.

lando2319 6y ago
I believe they have added Chromecast support
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  Thanks, but that defeats the point. If I’m at home, I’d rather watch a proper 30-60 minute show.

dig6x 6y ago

Quibi claimed to be competing with free and i think thats where they made their mistake. People on Youtube can leave a 10 minute vlog half way and still feel satisfied that they got their fill of quick stimulation. Quibi forces high effort engagement into a snippet of time where that's the last thing you want to be doing. Of course if they aren't competing with free, then they're competing with Netflix and honestly there is no USP on that side either. Its clear that they were exposed on both sides from the get go.

fasicle 6y ago

I tried Quibi for a few days when it was released (90 day free trial) but found the content to be pretty boring. Maybe I just wasn't in the mood for it, but I tried a few different shows and nothing really kept me engaged like shows on Netflix.

hexmiles 6y ago

I'm (in theory) the target demographics for this app. I love short content (YouTube, podcast, web-comics, etc...) and always on the go. The main problem (for me) was the lack of content, for some reason they didn't tap in the YouTube ecosystem where there is plentiful of talent that specialize in the short (10 minute or less) format, Minutephysics is the first example that come to mind. Instead they went for the big-star tactics that really doesn't work. I watched all the show and, while some of them are good, the vast majority is only "meh". This plus the low number of show and episode, doesn't allow me to justify speeding the money of the subscription. It seem they tried to do Netflix "but short", instead of specializing in on-the-go entertainment. They don't even have podcast! However i really want a service with curated short content, but i want more than video! I'm also interested in podcast, articles (side note: can someone recommend summary "this-week-in-[argument]" site or channel?). I currently use YouTube, but a more curated multi-media platform (without ads) would be awesome and i would pay for it.

mobilemidget 6y ago
Was this service promoted outside the USA (other way put, should I have heard about this in EU?)? You at least heard of it, and used it.
- hexmiles 6y ago
  I first became aware of it from a friend in the states, and i tried on my phone. Edit: i'm not aware of any marketing in EU, and also i needed to get through some hops to get the app
- geerlingguy 6y ago
  I'm in the USA and I've heard the name once or twice ('some viral video series coming soon!' type ads), but didn't even realize it launched. Maybe I'm not the target demographic.
  - perardi 6y ago
    They also launched April 6, 2020, which was right smack in the middle of pandemic lockdowns. Not great timing to get eyes on your ads. Not the right mood for “here’s light and quick content for your commute!”

phire 6y ago

The fact that I've never heard of it until now makes me highly suspicious they failed to market the service correctly.

elwell 6y ago
I must have seen their (annoying, to me) ads over a 100 times already.
- s1mon 6y ago
  Where? I've only managed to read about it in the media. Zero ads.
  - elwell 6y ago
    Either sling or hulu, forget...
- phire 6y ago
  Yes, that was what I was suspicious about. They flooded their target market (which I'm obviously outside of) with hundreds of low effort ads which probably turned people off it. And it seems like they did next to nothing to build their brand outside of that targeted advertising.

jdxcode 6y ago

I could not believe they wanted $5/month WITH ads!

cududa 6y ago

Their The Most Dangerous game had a lot of potential, but I want to watch it on my 70” TV, not my 5” phone screen. I know they recently enabled AirPlay, but seriously, if they would’ve just launched with a smart TV app they might’ve been better off

KoftaBob 6y ago

Making it mobile only in the beginning was a big mistake, I think they overestimated how many younger people would want to watch on their phones with no option to watch on their TV. It tries to be tiktok and netflix at the same time, without being good at either vertical.

pkulak 6y ago

This is a really funny video take on the whole situation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc

binarysolo 6y ago
That guy's amazing (and has a great take on the whole issue).
SilasX 6y ago
Thanks! That’s a great overview! (and I say that as someone that generally doesn’t like getting journalism through videos.)

elcomet 6y ago

It started in april 2020, ie 3 months ago. I think it's presumptuous to say that it "failed" already. It's just below its own target. Lot ot things can still happen. They can release a show that'll become viral and bring them million of subscribers. But of course there are some very strange decisions: - Mobile-only is weird. Why not make mobile a priority, but people are used to watch shows on their TV or PC. And you cannot watch things with multiple other people. Even with one person, it's not really practical. - Did not allow screenshot: for a mobile only, it's strange, they failed to understand something about the internet. Heck, they could have made a button to annotate and share a screenshot on social media in-app since they're in mobile-only. That would have been something people are used to. But at least allow people to share the content they like. You're just forbidding free advertisment.

perardi 6y ago
They at least seem to be rethinking the “only on mobile” thing. You can now play on a TV using a Chromecast or AirPlay. Still no dedicated smart TV or streaming stick apps, though. https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-use-Chromecast-or-Apple-AirPlay-with-my-Quibi-app- https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-...
- Terretta 6y ago
  Compared to web pages, video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video subscription, so 720p (or, say, 360p for iOS 14 PIP mode) yields significantly different cost basis. The only on mobile thing may have been necessary for the business model.
  - carlosdp 6y ago
    I very much doubt they made that decision based on bandwidth costs though. They've burned a billion dollars already, don't think they are thinking about margins much at the moment.
  - donavanm 6y ago
    > video storage and bandwidth is a meaningful portion of video CPM or video subscription Maybe "compared to web pages". But very skeptical it's a meaningful cost compared to production or subscription prices. Even going with a third party CDN you're probably not paying more than ¢1/GB of transfer. For 720P h.264 that's about about 2GB, or 2¢, per hour of content transferred. How many pennies per month do you need before it's a meaningful portion of the $7 subscription price?

rogerdickey 6y ago

Flagged, as this is clickbait. Quibi has not failed or "crashed", it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets.

zemo 6y ago
From the article: > while it’s too soon to declare the end of Quibi, it’s still worth asking: is the promise of the quick bite already over? And what went so wrong? it doesn't say "it failed" it says their adoption has collapsed. "it has simply not met early (and very ambitious) targets" is just another way of saying their numbers are bad, which is ... all the article is saying. Doesn't seem even remotely close to warranting a flag.
- nwsm 6y ago
  The title says it crashed.
mellosouls 6y ago
Flagging is an overreaction I think. It's unfriendly but in depth, and unfortunately these titles are the way of the world.

rvz 6y ago

It's quite simple why Quibi failed. They couldn't retain users during when the lockdown measures were in place in April, which they betted heavily on. If they couldn't gain those users at that time, then they would be finished as soon as the lockdown was being eased. I guess that a mobile only, 10 minute video platform wasn't appealing to those users who bought into the original hype of purchasing this service and later switched back to the good old Netflix, Apple TV+ and Disney+. It had no chance and was dead before it was even born. The fact that all of Hollywood was backing this and throwing $1.7 billion is at most the top charts of product failures and part of the greatest hits of VC hype trains I've seen so far. As the comments here already have mentioned, this can be best described as a high speed expensive train crash for investors.

acdha 6y ago
Mobile only - and it reportedly didn’t support sharing, which would explain why I never saw _anyone_ talking about it. Installing an app is a barrier to adoption and they intentionally blocked the most common way to get over that by letting people on social media convince their friends there’s something worth watching.
SomeoneFromCA 6y ago
I'd argue that the lockdown was (and potentially, unfortunately, will be again) a better time for standard long shows, someone could binge 10 hours in a row.

LockAndLol 6y ago

They spent 1.75$bn in 3 months??? If they spent that kind of money on original series on a worldwide CC license, spammed the shit out of it on social media and provided integrations with every video platform in existence, they would've achieved much more than whatever it is they were trying to achieve.

ogre_codes 6y ago

They lost me at $4.99/ month with advertising and $6.99/ month without. Since I can't stand video advertising, this costs just as much as Disney+ for an absolutely unknown content library. Comparing them to Disney+ isn't remotely fair though because Disney+ contains a huge library of content and people know exactly what they are getting. Which leave's me scratching my head. So lets look at another company trying to get into the media game at the ground floor. The Apple TV+ launch was similarly a bit starved for known media properties and went with a fairly similar buy the celebrity sort of route into the business. That's why they have Oprah and Steven Spielberg titles featured prominently. It's why they have Foundation coming on Apple TV+. And Apple TV+ is $4.99/ month commercial free and (for many), a full year of free content. Even with comparable talent at launch, lower pricing and more generous terms, Apple's offering isn't exactly blowing the doors off the market either. (I kind of think it's doing Ok, just not making Netflix or DIS sweat too much). If you want to get into media streaming right now, you need to either have a strong existing brand, or you need to be willing to lose a lot of money for a long time building up a catalog of trusted franchises.

deleted 6y ago
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admax88q 6y ago

> Quibi Who?

zachware 6y ago

When I think of Quibi I think of the companies that I used to see set up "activations" in this one space on Abbot Kinney in Venice (LA). They were always new social apps or other things that received funding from outside the tech sphere and figured their best bet was to setup a thing on a shopping street. Money != product even if you have nearly $2B dollars.

hogFeast 6y ago

Jeferry Katzenberg is way way overrated. I believed the shtick about him being behind Disney's animation success. I held Dreamworks Animation, admittedly the buyout was a fair price, but he got paid a ton of money for fairly mixed performance. Shrek, Kung Fu Panda definitely decent franchises but he piled the profit from these films into a ton of shit that didn't work (and his own pocket, somehow he is a billionaire). But yeah, this had failure written all over it. I think the concept is basically fine...you don't know until you try it. But pouring a billion dollars into this was fucking lunacy (and the fact that Katzenberg invested too, shows that he is genuinely just not very good at his job). Like you prove the concept with far lower levels of capital...the issue was that the product was dogshit, not that you needed a billion dollars to make it work.

frsandstone 6y ago

This is a good time for a reminder about the startup journey. Quibi is in the "Trough of Sorrow" which is NORMAL. https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough-of-sorrow/ https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-...

ogre_codes 6y ago
Suggesting they are in a trough implies that there was an initial bump of enthusiasm which seems completely absent. There was a bit of advertising driven early uptake, but it didn't stick at all. I'm not even sure I'd consider a celebrity backed company that was backed by nearly $2B out of the gate a startup in the normal sense.
snowwrestler 6y ago
The problem with Quibi is that they never saw that initial bump. They went straight from launch to the trough.

ekanes 6y ago

I'm sure there are counter-examples, and this is totally gut feeling, but it never seems like things that start with Q work out! Never invest in Q.

mason55 6y ago

> Quibi’s signature “Turnstyle” technology, which allowed content to flow from portrait view to landscape and back again seamlessly on your phone, is tied up in a patent lawsuit with a deep-pocketed hedge fund. Seems like this minimizes the seriousness a bit. The deep pocketed hedge fund is Elliott Management and they are basically gunning for the whole company. They're working with the original patent holder and bankrolling the law suit process. Elliott (Paul Singer) are not stupid and they don't play nice. If they are stepping into bankroll this lawsuit then they obviously see something and the lawsuit should be considered an existential threat to Quibi. Singer strikes fear into sovereign nations so a couple media execs are going to be small potatoes.

quxpar 6y ago
Wait... they did what? I didn't realize they had such a terrible idea at the core of their business.... > Every show (and ad) is filmed and edited in both portrait and landscape. Creators upload two video files and a separate audio file, which are then synced and streamed simultaneously to your phone, so the video instantly switches when you rotate the device. I already dread getting the sides chopped off my movies due to aspect ratio confusion, are they seriously offering a platform where I'm always missing out on one half of the footage? Maybe it's the ol' OCD kicking in, but I imagine constantly switching back and forth to try to figure out the 'right' angle to look at a scene from. It seems deeply unpleasant.
- deleted 6y ago
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- 1123581321 6y ago
  You don’t miss too much. When you watch it you learn the typical cuts. Landscape only works most of the time, with portrait if you want to see two characters standing close to one another in more detail. Sometimes portrait shows multiple shots at once, which is neat. There are supposedly some shows that add hidden information (e.g. portrait shows a character’s phone screen) but I never countered it. I actually wish the cuts differed more by showing angles from totally different cameras or being colored differently. It would be expensive but seriously groundbreaking. One day.

jariel 6y ago

This is startup hubris because: 1) they are trying to innovate along a few vectors at the same time, choose one. 2) Political leaders not highly engaged with the details of the experience. Whitman scaled EBay she did not start it. 3) You have a pile of cash, and tons of people looking to cash in huge by grabbing some of the pie for easy money. That one of the content buyers gave his $6M for voice overs is definitely a scandal - this could only happen in a hyper politicised world.

mizay7 6y ago

Quibi seems like a neat idea but is being run very strangely for what it is: its being run like old media when the point is that it's new media. -where is the trial option for a new media format? -where are the samples of series on YouTube? -where are my targeted ads on YouTube that point me to those samples? I saw enough stuff about Quibi on websites where I get my TV and movie discussions to be interested, but nothing in places where I make decisions about what web content i consume to even consider dealing with the friction of a new app and a new subscription.

seem_2211 6y ago
There were a ton of Quibi ads on Tik Tok. But it doesn't have the virality and originality, and honestly I don't think it ever will. Big production budgets and incredible story lines are something that Hollywood does a really good job of (and we've seen that come to TV over the past 10 years). But the sort of Tik Toks and Youtube videos that I like are pretty basic, and would be laughed out of the room as boring. It's like comparing a newspaper article with a novel. They're different products that do different jobs.

chadlavi 6y ago

It had no strong differentiator and it had a stupid name. As a consumer I just dismissed it as soon as I first heard it mentioned. It seems I wasn't the only one!

diogenescynic 6y ago

Wrong question. Why did anyone think it would succeed? There was zero organic demand for this and it just seemed like some ill-conceived VC backed company that was trying to be the next TikTok. How did it crash so fast? Because it tried to solve something that no one cared about and didn't offer any real meaningful value--their launched 'shows' were garbage quality. Also, Meg Whitman... she ran Ebay and HP into the ground. Why pick her to lead a startup or all people? This was doomed from inception.

ponker 6y ago

Most companies are destined to fail. If you invest $1.75 billion logically, you invest $1m in 10 companies, then after a year take the best-performing of those and invest another $5m in each, take the next three and invest $1m more to give them another year, and let the bottom three fail. A year later you see if any of the middle three have done well, put $5m into those, and $50m into the top performers of the A-list batch. In doing so you will find yourself investing more money in the stronger-performing companies and overall you are unlikely to lose massive amounts of money (you will only be investing hundreds of millions of dollars in companies that are already very successful, so even if they don't achieve what you wanted them to, you will at least be able to recover some of your investment). Or, you can just go and bet $1.75b on rolling a six and sit there scratching your head when it doesn't work out.

russellbeattie 6y ago

There are a lot of startups which make you question your sanity, but they end up working out because your initial assumptions or understanding of the market are completely wrong. I've been caught enough times over the years to give the benefit of the doubt to new companies. That said, this is not one of those times. Quibi's business model as it stands now is batshit insane. The fact that it hasn't taken off has given me a deep sense of relief that the guy in the mirror is not the one who is barking mad. Personally, my guess is that it's some sort of Russian oligarch money laundering scheme. Or something akin to a modern day equivalent of The Producers where they make money from total failure.

bcrescimanno 6y ago

There’s a reason that the phrase, “Content is King” is so prevalent: it’s a fact. Like many, I saw dozens of ads for Quibi (many of them on YouTube) and the entire campaign was centered around selling me on the concept of short-form content—-something I found hilarious on YouTube since anyone who frequents YouTube is probably already pretty sold on that concept. At no point was I given any indication of what I could watch. Every ad left me totally disengaged because I was either left to guess at what they might have or to assume that their library must be pretty shit if they aren’t going to talk about it. I worked at Netflix when the company began the idea of a “Netflix Original.” Everyone points to House of Cards as the first (and, in terms of Netflix-produced content, it was) but there was a lesser known first original called “Lillyhammer.” You didn’t hear about it because it was literally dipping the toes into the water of what it meant to “own” content rather that just license it. It wasn’t a signature piece of content we could build a brand around. House of Cards and Orange is the New Black were the big ones and they came 6 and 9 months later respectively. They were “signature” shows that set the tone of what Netflix originals were all about. I remember the lead Product Manager and I sitting together and discussing whether we should include a promotional photo of one of the characters from House of Cards giving the camera the middle finger in our main experience. We knew that parents and conservative groups might be upset by it being right there in our UI; but, we also knew the tone we wanted to set for our content. We put it in. The content drove our marketing. It was important that people get on board with the idea of “Netflix Originals.” But it was more important that the content spoke for itself. In Quibi’s case, they need content they can showcase that speak for itself and gets people on the platform. No one will care if it’s “short form” or “long form” as long as it’s GOOD.

emeraldd 6y ago
This a thousand times over! WTH is a Quibi and why should I care? That's the question I always asked after one of those commercials. It was like watching someone trying to sell a blank notebook with a fancy cover that wouldn't take ink ...

tgflynn 6y ago

Maybe because they bought a lot of stupid and annoying commercials that made no sense to anyone.

npunt 6y ago

Quibi saddled a weird new idea for media to a traditional paywall streaming service business model. Irrespective of anything else, that's a bad start. Traditional media subscriptions work because you know what you're getting - sit down, watch a show that they offer. There's no ambiguity about whether you'll like the sitting down and watching part, it's only down to whether you'll like the particular show. For a consumer its very low risk. Quibi's medium is new and exploratory, and you don't really know what you're getting both in viewing experience and the content itself as they leveraged no existing IP. If you don't know what you're getting, and nobody else knows because its new, paywalling is a terrible idea. I'm sure there's a way to make bite-sized media pay for itself, but the path for that is probably as an offshoot of a social app like TikTok or a niche community play that slowly expands out, not some big Hollywood standalone spectacle.

sjg007 6y ago

It should be free with ad support. Five minutes of laughs followed by a commercial interlude sort of gets you in the standard sitcom world anyway. Then maybe add a premium payment option.

Causality1 6y ago

People won't pay a subscription for short-form content. Back in the day cartoons came at the beginning of movies because nobody would go to a theater for a fifteen minute show. Today short-form content is supported by advertising, be it on YouTube or Facebook or TikTok.

ponker 6y ago
Spotify?

jedberg 6y ago

I knew as soon as I heard about Quibi that it would fail. A few reasons: - Mobile first short content has already been tried multiple times by the big players and failed to find a market fit. The only one who has succeeded is YouTube, and they're free. - Original content only. You can't start a streaming service with just original content. You need a library of content, which means licensing existing content, or having a library already (HBOMax, CBS All Access, Peacock, etc. all have back catalogs from their parent companies). - Meg Whitman. I worked for Meg at eBay/PayPal. She was brilliant. But her expertise is growing a successful enterprise, not coming from behind. Look at her two main gigs -- eBay/PayPal, where she came into an already profitable enterprise and made it explode, and HPE, where she came into a failing enterprise and made it worse.

techlaw 6y ago

An article about one of their shows ('Murder House') told me all I needed to know about Quibi. Our culture does not need to trivialize murder or revictimize victims of crime more than we already do, thank you. No amount of quality content could overcome my revulsion to use a service which features this: "There's a new television show in the works that combines all your favorite things: home renovation projects and true crime stories [...] all about renovation houses where murders took place."[1] [1] https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called-murder-house-flip-will-be-your-new-obsession/ https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called...

HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
I take it you've never watched Investigation Discovery, aka, The Murder Channel? https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/ https://www.investigationdiscovery.com/ One of my favorite channels, BTW :-)
- Marsymars 6y ago
  Irrespective of the OP's stance, I just don't get true crime media. I've tried a few of them, and they hold my interest about as well as CSI/NCIS, or watching a weather channel for a foreign country.
- techlaw 6y ago
  No, I haven't. And rather than try to infer your implication(s) about Investigation Discovery I will ask directly: - Do they treat murder as a venue for entertainment? - Are they seemingly indifferent to the impact on victims? Because, if it was not clear, those were the points I was trying to convey about the unhealthy aspects of Quibi's show.
  - HeyLaughingBoy 6y ago
    Well, they're definitely not indifferent to the victims. ID has a bunch of different shows, but a lot of them involve interviews with victims interspersed with the story but they certainly seem sympathetic to their situation. As far as it being a "venue for entertainment," well, the basis of the channel is crime stories, primarily murders and it would be a stretch to say that it's for educational purposes, so...

dhosek 6y ago

T-Mobile offers it free with cell phone service. I'm still not interested enough to bother with it. Apparently there's a celebrity fan-made remake of The Princess Bride that's going up on the service. I'm a little curious to see it, but it's still not enough to bother with downloading an app to use a service I get for free.

pkamb 6y ago

Instagram Stories and Snapchat both prove that there absolutely is a huge demand for mobile-only portrait short-form video content. Maybe not "produced TV shows" in that format, as Quibi seemed to be pushing. But I'd much prefer watching vloggers/YouTubers/Twitch/etc. in that format rather than in a landscape video on my phone.

Apofis 6y ago

The name sounds like some chinese app that I see spammed on YouTube ads all the timed and a paid subscription at this time for a vine-like TV streaming service? HULU was free for ages. Disney+ just came out. Fail.

loraa 6y ago

Celebrities are so full of themselves that the thought people would give a shit if they were doing something other than amusing us. So arrogant.

dirkg 6y ago

Netflix rival ??!! Only in the wild imaginings and ramblings of its founders. A stupid concept endlessly hyped by billionaire founder and vapid celebs, anti-consumer and useless, and having the nerve to blame Covid-19 for the failure of your idea - the hubris and arrogance is truly breathtaking.

newbie789 6y ago

I don't mean to sound negative, but I thought from the original announcement that this model was absurd. Yes, people like watching content on their phones, but the novelty of that (for me) was the freedom that came from being locked in to my TV or PC. Freedom was the thing that made me welcome YouTube to my phone. When I read that Quibi was going to lock customers into a single format I literally laughed out loud. It seemed to me that maybe the founders consulted a handful of teenagers and got pranked in the process. I installed Quibi a while back, got the 90 day trial, and uninstalled it in under an hour after realizing I couldn't cast it to my FireStick. >...the company is in talks with Amazon Fire and Roku to bring the app to TV. This is even funnier. If they had done this much, much earlier they would probably be in much better shape. The fact that they're doing it now indicates that this is the case. Again, I cannot stress how funny it is that at some point in some meeting, somebody pitched something akin to "You know what people don't care about/hate? Choice." and that flew. It's like something from a Christopher Guest movie.

CPUstring 6y ago
Quibi has all the hallmarks of _corporate_ groupthink. "You know what the kids like? They like phones and Joe Jonas, my daughter won't stop talking about him." These things are made by executives and leaders that are so type-A they don't actually look at their phones because they're barking out orders to format a PowerPoint slide, and then instead of just asking their kid if they'd do something (sit down for ten minutes to watch Sophie Turner) they get a big panel of people (who sign up to do panel studies) and ask them. When big media companies make apps, it's like when developers go to the edge of a town and build an urban hellscape edge city. When will media executives realize they can't Robert Moses their way into the FAANG?

dzonga 6y ago

no boots on the ground is why it failed. saw many ads on mobile reddit, about quibi. and even was a massive turn off. they made the same mistake, netflix is doing now: not investing in good content creators i.e writers, producers etc. have a home run of a show, then people will migrate to your platform. same playbook, disney+ used.

nathanvanfleet 6y ago

To me Quibi was immediately a sort of joke. I saw the video ads about a pilot watching Quibi or something and kind of ignored it. I knew what the platform was sort of but I never checked it out. It's kind of like the reality of any app-store platform, you have to have a killer app. In this case it would be a video series that can't be found anywhere other than Quibi that makes them have to check it out. Maybe there was one that I don't know about, but I feel like their ads should have been telling me where to find what I already wanted instead of just trying to entice me to check it out because they paid someone to pretend to be a pilot who is checking it out.

whatgoodisaroad 6y ago

It's increasingly looking like an unpopular opinion, but Quibi to me seems like an obviously sound business strategy. It's seemingly skating where the puck is going through numerous media consumption trends. At worst, this short-term failure seems like the failure of Google Wave, namely that it failed by being too far ahead of its time (and it's ideas will be cannibalized into however many yet-to-be-invented media products). This doesn't detract from the pleasure I have at seeing it fail, mainly because of the way they wantonly plagiarized Everything Is Terrible with "Memory Hole". But, to generalize, I think a lot of people have lots of different reasons to feel animosity towards Quibi, and we're all collectively misconstruing that animosity as identification of a weak business model (which I don't believe it is).

maps7 6y ago
I agree. It's a good model but without killer content it won't gain much traction. Finding that killer content will be hard because it's new. It's not going to be the same killer content that Netflix has.

drumhead 6y ago

As always with failures like this, it was the answer to a question no one asked.

DeonPenny 6y ago

Dang didn't this just come out. I just learned about this app. I thought it was just really small, iterating its business, and just blew up. I didn't even know they made startups like this anymore.

jhfdbkofdcho 6y ago

The new Reno 911 was really good. In that it is exactly what I wanted (more Reno 912), but i had to watch it on my phone so whatever. There were some moments where you could rotate the phone to watch a different angle but it wasn’t essential. Maybe they should try putting up more Reno 911, couldn’t hurt.

ibdf 6y ago

I tried Quibi and I did not even finish the free trial. The reason being, is that it doesn't know what it is. Quibi was great for short shows that are made in short format... but it wanted me to watch a long show in a short format - which it just means that now instead of watching one episode for 30 mins I need to watch 6 episodes for 5 mins. I also think their timing was an issue.. because with this pandemic people have more time to watch shows, long shows, movies, and I honestly don't think many people would pick Quibi when there are so many more options with so much more content.

mrnobody_67 6y ago

Whatifi is way better.... interactive movie games that you watch with your friends.

ryanmarsh 6y ago

Because the terrible name?

mrnobody_67 6y ago

Success is almost inversely proportional to money raised pre-launch.... Magic Leap is another example. Theranos. Top 10 ICOs all failures with no users despite $100m+ each.

blhack 6y ago

Some thoughts: 1) The name is awful. Nothing about "quibi" tells me that it is a streaming platform. "you tube" "net flix" "vimeo" etc. These are all obviously video platforms, and the name indicates that. There are exceptions to this, obviously, but the name definitely is not helping. 2) There is no way I am going to watch anything longer than 30 seconds on my phone unless I absolutely have to. Mobile data overages are expensive. I'm not going to risk my wifi cutting out, and eating through my monthly data to watch reno 911. How I would fix this: 1) Change the name. "Mob-ix" is a portmanteau of "mobile and flix". Change the name to mobix. 2) Create a website where I can watch this content. 3) Post some of the content on youtube, twitter, instagram, etc. That's where you supposed users are. Go to them. 4) Make this content available on amazon video, itunes, etc. as well. I'll pay you for reno 911. It seems like they're trying to make a new genre of video, that's cool, and maybe this will stick, but you need to convince people that this is valuable and that they should not only pay a new service, but invest into a new paradigm. I think that by posting some of this on the existing places where people are watching short-form video is how you do that.

zem 6y ago

honestly, the minute i saw "mobile only" i pretty much lost interest in quibi, and in fact i had entirely forgotten that they existed. i'm glad the guardian called that out as one of the factors contributing to their demise, and would love to see the entire trend of mobile-only apps and services go the way of the dodo.

deleted 6y ago

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jccalhoun 6y ago

I am not the market for this. I live less than a mile from work (when I am going into work...). However, some of the reviews I have seen have argued that some of the shows didn't even use the format well and seemed to have been reedited from traditional shows. That makes it less appealing for me. Then there are also rumors that because the "episodes" are so short that they can be filmed using largely non-union crew which, if true, is pretty shitty. I have looked but I haven't found anything more than tweets claiming this though.

dragonsngoblins 6y ago

I had literally never even heard of Quibi before I saw this headline

cvburgess 6y ago

A thing I don't think enough people are talking about is that this launched in the era of stay-at-home but it was designed for the on-the-go person. The folks that want to watch super short-form content optimized for a smart phone are the folks on the subway or on a lunch break but now most of the world is at home surrounded by large screens and high-quality, well known content so Quibi has nearly no appeal. Give it a year ( if they can make it that long ) and I think you'll see them align with a larger on-the-go audience but at the current price point with all new, smartphone-optimized content they just don't fit into a market where people have access all day to TVs and are craving comforting, familiar favorites in juxtaposition to a world that is full of change and generally full of anxiety.