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Quibi Is Shutting Down
- snowwrestler 6y agoIf they could figure out how to monetize schadenfreude, they might have a good shot to make a bunch of money right now.
- ilamont 6y agoReally hard to compete in a media market with a half-dozen established competitors. It requires breakout shows and/or a completely different approach to content and audiences. Fox did it in the late 80s with the Simpsons. The niche approach can work, too, if it truly dominates (like ESPN did in the first 15 years of its existence).
- quercusa 6y agoThe article has been updated to say "Is Shutting Down".
- dang 6y agoThanks—title updated above.
- phjesusthatguy3 6y agoThat was one quick bite.
- interestica 6y agoTurns out I learned the meaning of the name after its end.
- jjmorrison 6y ago:O! That's what Quibi stands for??!
- DennisAleynikov 6y agooh man thank god, what a weird desperate play with no partner vertical TV manufacturers to show content and constraining to mobile devices basically made this unusable as a streaming platform
- mgadams3 6y agoWow, that honestly happened much sooner than I thought that it would. Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough. Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience... Who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll all be like "Quibi was really ahead of it's time"
- DennisAleynikov 6y agoseems like this was a "oops wrong time" money overinvestment? like they made a serious play to enter the market and then, bam everyones back to TV only... great your market has just died essentially and the essential workers don't care for new age apps for content quite as much as the free time on the facebook shuttle crowd
- gk1 6y ago> raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience... It's easy to look back and say that. I wouldn't have guessed people cared about temporary video messages, but look at Snap.
- dogma1138 6y agoSnap allowed you to have conversations like you would in the real world as in ones that aren’t automatically put into permanent record. Quibi gave you portrait TV shows with low production value with actors trying to cash in on the remainder of their GoT fame.
- Nextgrid 6y ago> I wouldn't have guessed people cared about temporary video messages, but look at Snap. Nobody's paying for Snap either. The only reason they are (somewhat) alive is because advertisers still think burning money on annoying people is worth it based on inflated or misleading metrics. Once the adtech bubble pops they'll be down the toilet as well.
- dvt 6y ago
- type02 6y agoDid Quibi ever poach any top talent from the other established competitors? I can't remember seeing them attracting any key hires besides the legacy founding team.
- throwawayqas 6y agoYes -- software engineers and product managers from Snapchat.
- dasm 6y agowith Snap's earnings pop today, it must be tough to be them
- spicyramen 6y agoI think this failure was the result of an already segmented TV on demand market. Too many options and adding a new one for x reason was just not appealing to public
- TuringNYC 6y agoThe funny thing is there is an active thread right now on HN about breaking up Google (including Youtube.) Supposedly, "there isn't enough competition and there arent options."
- arcticfox 6y agoIs Google a "TV on demand" company to you? I don't think anyone is talking about breaking up YouTube itself, unless I missed something. It would be one of the pieces Google would be broken into.
- tekromancr 6y agoThe notion that people think Google's monopoly exists in the streaming video space just might be the most intellectually dishonest thing I have read today. Neat!
- unethical_ban 6y agoThat isn't remotely the same thing.
- TuringNYC 6y agoRegardless of downvotes, there is literally chat about breaking up YouTube the same day: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24852504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24852504 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24850702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24850702 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849147 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849147 My point is how inconsistent all this is -- on one hand, there is discussion about how YouTube should be broken up because there are not sufficient players. On the other hand a huge contender just shut down because there wasnt sufficient interest in yet another streaming platform.
- jmsflknr 6y agoWSJ independently confirms (for those who don't have a subscription to The Information): https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1318996449884078084 https://twitter.com/BenMullin/status/1318996449884078084
- arbuge 6y ago$2B gone in 6 months must be something of a record for burn rate. A starting investment of that size probably qualifies it for a record in the fat (as distinct from lean) startup size category as well.
- holler 6y agoWorking on a bootstrapped project and just imagining what I could do with $2billion... Imagine what half the people on HN could do with it. It's obscene. I think they were trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that.
- president 6y ago> I think they were trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that. It could work if your product met or was at least close to the minimum quality standard of your competitors. From what I've seen and read, Quibi was horribly substandard.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- gumby 6y ago> trying to essentially buy their way into mainstream adoption, but it doesn't really work like that. Katzenberg comes from an industry (film studios) for which that is largely the model. They are willing to have some expensive failures ($100MM-scale) if the successes will launch a "franchise" which is subsequently mined. A failure more than an order of magnitude off what's tolerable in his old industry may be hard to survive, who knows. But industrial filmmaking is a lot like industrial food production: a blend of fear (customers won't adopt the new) and dictating the product to the customer.
- holler 6y ago> They are willing to have some expensive failures ($100MM-scale) if the successes will launch a "franchise" that makes sense, and definitely feels like they were building a rocket-sized dart to throw. it'd be interesting to see the breakdown on how much of that capital went towards engineering the app vs content/other.
- tmysl 6y agoAnybody surprised? streaming is super saturated at the moment and unless you have proven legacy content its tough to make a dent
- diogenescynic 6y agoMeg Whitman is laughing all the way to the bank.
- jeffbee 6y agoJust in time for her to fail up into a Biden cabinet position.
- tibbydudeza 6y agoWord is that she is being considered by Biden for a govt post.
- dbbk 6y agoMaybe she'll take over whatever Linda McMahon does.
- cure 6y agoShe's a republican.
- Jtsummers 6y agoShe spoke at this year's Democratic convention in support of Biden. Not saying that implies the potential for her to end up in his cabinet, but a lot of Republicans have crossed into independent or Democratic territory the last few years (some while retaining Republican party affiliation for now).
- erehweb 6y agoThere's precedent - William Cohen was a Republican Secretary of Defense for Bill Clinton.
- Infinitesimus 6y agoOff-topic: That doesn't matter much since she vocally supported Hilary Clinton and also supports Joe Biden.
- x87678r 6y ago
- jonny_eh 6y agoJust got around to trying it for the first time last night. I waited until they had an app on Android TV. Nice app. I was surprised that most of the videos looked good on the TV, I had assumed they were designed for portrait mode.
- simcop2387 6y agoWonder if any of the content will end up on other platforms or if it'll just be lost.
- Robadob 6y agoVice posted a new video (about American Apparel) to their YouTube today, was tagged with Quibi at the start and end.
- kristofferR 6y agoAround half of the shows are pirated at least, let's hope someone saves the rest before closure.
- jedberg 6y agoThis is not the least bit surprising. They never reached product market fit, and anyone who works in video streaming was pretty sure they never would. Both Netflix and Hulu have experimented with short form "mobile-optimized" viewing. Short things to watch on your commute or between meetings. Neither had much success with the format.
- jtsiskin 6y agoWow, with $1.75 billion raised. What happens now?
- offtop5 6y agoHey it's like Netflix with a microscopic level of content, can't take screenshots, and you can't just watch it on your TV like normal video. No, don't you understand I totally want to pay $10 a month to hold my phone awkwardly and watch 10 minute videos. What could go wrong
- interestica 6y ago> hold my phone awkwardly Which way is that?
- Accujack 6y agoPretty much any way.
- sedatk 6y agoI presume it’s how the monkey holds Simba in Lion King.
- bluu00 6y agooff by one, but > Quibi also faces a patent infringement lawsuit filed by interactive video company Eko, which alleges that Quibi stole its technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically on phones from Eko. technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically What da fak!
- makerofspoons 6y agoQuibi has a feature where the content changes depending on if you hold your phone in portrait or landscape. It doesn't add very much and it's annoying to switch back and forth.
- dang 6y agoPlease don't be snarky and put down other people's work like this. That's against the intended spirit of HN as well as the site guidelines; https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html Please especially don't do that to dance on someone's grave. I'm sure that you can express your substantive points thoughtfully.
- jrgd 6y ago2 billion 6 months
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- iamdbtoo 6y agoI think the reason this failed is simply that good content is device agnostic. I don't think there are a lot of people out there watching Netflix on their phones wishing it was all filmed vertically.
- OzzyB 6y agoNo one wants to watch B-Movies in 10 minute segments and pay $10 for the privilege, no one.
- darth_avocado 6y ago10 min content that you can look at on your phone. Hmmmm. I wish they'd heard of Youtube before burning Billions.
- stunt 6y agoThe last thing Quibi wanted was COVID-19 work from home. Quibi was trying to target people to consume their content during their commute.
- danpalmer 6y agoWhile this might be true I think it’s easy to point to COVID as being the downfall of many companies now, when the reality is that many would have failed for other reasons. For Quibi, it seems the fundamental issue may have been lack of product market fit due to a) not testing, and b) having a shallow understanding of the entertainment market.
- kevstev 6y agoThis rings so hollow to me. You have tons of people who are all of a sudden working from home and are still doing lunches, or have lots of free time in general in an age where shorter form content is more prevalent. Yes, that was their target- but were they really only targeting NYC and a handful of other cities commuters? That's a pretty small TAM. Everyone else in a car and not watching content on their phone. The content was not compelling, and that's the real story. They overpaid to quickly produce a library with star power and the end results were sub par, and could not compete with free alternatives, or depending on how you look at it- could not force their way into the budgets for consumer's paid streaming services.
- rchaud 6y agoHow many people are we talking though? Subway trains usually don't get good cell reception, and a huge chunk of Americans drive to work, a time during which they wouldn't be watching video.
- pier25 6y agoPersonally, I don't have a problem consuming 15 mins of a 1 hour show.
- preommr 6y agoWhat's interesting about Quibi is that it somehow broke the mold as being a really bad idea that somehow got a lot of funding. It's hard to get funding and investors aren't usually stupid. You'll have people that'll make you jump through hoops and do their due diligence. But then once in a while, there'll be something that'll just be a mind boggling disaster that somehow breaks through against all norms. Stuff like Theranos or Nikola. Sidenote: There are so many important OSS projects that basically get little to no funding while things like Quibi burn millions if not billions in the dumbest way possible.
- akiselev 6y ago> investors aren't usually stupid Citation needed. Every portfolio I've looked at outside of the top firms has had multiple investments (approved by partners) that to my mind look mind bogglingly dumb. Not Theranos level of dumb, where they'd have to have a little knowledge of blood based diagnostics and the statistical significance of results from finger pricks to know its a fraud, but "we didn't do due diligence and found out that this is a perpetual motion machine/founder doesn't own critical IP/financials don't make sense in any universe" levels of dumb. The former slip through the cracks at even the best firms, but the latter is like watching a slow motion train wreck. With the benefit of hindsight, the entire industry looks like thousands of monkeys with typewriters (especially when biotech gets frothy).
- mytailorisrich 6y agoIt was founded by Jeff Katzenberg, not you or I. They guy probably has the personal number of all the CEOs in the business and they pick up the phone and listen if he calls. Then, with the success of Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram pitching a premium short videos app does not sound crazy especially, again, when it's Katzenberg pitching it to you (and he must have invested a good chunk of his own cash). Then he managed to hire Meg Whitman as CEO and first employee. So now it's Whitman and Katzenberg pitching that idea to you.
- TigeriusKirk 6y agoThey'll probably still pick up the phone and listen if he calls.
- mimixco 6y agoIt may be offline already. The app no longer works. Well, Flipped was good but not worth paying for and the dual screen mode thing added nothing but expense for them.
- causality0 6y agoDon't forget what might be the most incoherent marketing campaign of recent memory. I spent nearly a year seeing Quibi advertisements and had no idea it was a video streaming service until its financial troubles made it to HN.
- jdoliner 6y agoThis is the first I'm hearing that it's a video streaming service. Shutting down is the best marketing move they ever made, let's see if it works out for them.
- MattGaiser 6y agoI had heard of them multiple times before as well, but while I knew they did some kind of content, I had no idea what it was.
- rchaud 6y agoThey had video ads running constantly on Instagram for months. To me, it was pretty clear what the offering was (long form TikTok/Vine/Reels), and not something I really had any interest in.
- supernova87a 6y agoIt's sometimes funny (ok, sad) how some of the best ideas don't get attention because they're from a nobody, while other products dreamed up by committee (and a committee of hand-waving billionaires at that) who think being rich gives them good judgement get funded to the tune of a small country.
- kache_ 6y agoCongratulations to all of the downstream SaaS providers that made a ton of free money contracting out their systems to this trainwreck.
- rchaud 6y agoSave some kudos for the big, established TV and movie stars that made a killing producing content that had none of the stress and pain of a movie set or TV studio.
- say_it_as_it_is 6y agoI really want to hear the story about how Jeffrey Katzenberg managed to raise $2 Billion for a media startup
- pg_bot 6y agoFrom a variety article. "Actually, Quibi doesn’t own any of the big-budget premium content for which it has shelled out upwards of $100,000 per minute. The company has seven-year licenses on its short-form series; after two years, content owners have the right to assemble the shows and distribute them elsewhere." If they don't own the content what they hell did they spend 1.7 billion dollars on?! https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/quibi-considers-shutting-down-jeffrey-katzenberg-meg-whitman-1234812313/ https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/quibi-considers-shutti...
- hbosch 6y agoYou have to assume the strategy here was along the lines of: offer insanely creator-biased production contracts to get A-listers to participate in this awful medium, grow the user base, eject the early bait content and transition over years to a more Netflix Original/Amazon Studios model.
- adrr 6y agoSo they paid $1mm a 10 minute clip but don’t own the rights. Netflix pays that type of money for their their shows but owns the rights. Stranger things season 1 was $6mm an 60 minute episode.
- colinmhayes 6y agoStranger things only has 1 b list celebrity. I think quibi was banking on all the a listers in their content.
- Traster 6y agoThey own the right to distribute it for 2 years. For everything that isn't Seinfeld or Friends, 2 years probably is 99% of the revenue. As long as Quibi does a decent job of selling those licenses they'll probably recover some of their investment. Oh, and by the end of 2 years Quibi will either be bankrupt or a $100b company, so it's not like it mattered to Quibi.
- pg_bot 6y ago
- irrational 6y agoDid anyone here ever actually try it out? What were your thoughts?
- Thaxll 6y ago$2B later no one is accountable?
- xnyan 6y agoI'm half convinced this was a giant payday scheme on the part of everyone but Whitman and Katzenberg. "Oh yes, sounds like a great idea! I need to get paid up front of course" - All the creators and actors cashing in. I've never liked any management work Whitman has done, and Katzenberg's primary skill is raising money. How could this have possibly gone right?
- kevstev 6y agoInterestingly I bought my house from a fairly high up (they have a "head of" title) person that defected to LA to work for Quibi. At the time my wife, who is in media, thought that it was a great move that was pretty much guaranteed to be a home run. I wonder how they made out on it all. they had reasonably good track record prior and likely had a reasonably good cash component, but any equity they had must be wiped. I feel bad saying this, but I thank Quibi for my lovingly renovated house. No backsies!
- luhn 6y agoIt's obvious this was doomed to failed since it launched, but this is a lot quicker than I expected. I never really got how it was ever supposed to work. Bootstrapping an entire library to compete against Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, et al? Even with 2 billion dollars of funding that's a tall order. 10 minute shows was an interesting gimmick, but it's not that different than a syndicated half hour. It might even be worse—Too long to have the instant gratification of Tiktok and too short to flesh out a good single-episode story arc.
- mmaunder 6y agoAt American Film Market last year, everyone was abuzz about Quibi before it launched. They appeared to have checked all the boxes. When they launched, my wife (who also attended AFM and is also in the film space) became a user, and I experienced it vicariously. A few thoughts on why this failed, and then simply shut down instead of being acquired. 1) Their hypothesis that short form content was desirable was deeply flawed, and I think based on an assumption that online attention spans are short. This is not true with film and TV where the trend has gone over to binge watching very long form content e.g. Vikings, House of Cards, etc. 2) There was no way to watch their content on a big screen. So that introduced another assumption - that no large market segment would want to consume their content on a bigger screen. We actually tried to watch it on Amazon Fire and the hack is horrible. 3) They decided they wanted to attract a number of A list directors and other talent and blew not only a lot of budget on that, but they also wrote their terms so that after two years they lose exclusivity and after 7 years the content reverts back to the creator. This is insane, if you consider the investment and long term value around the films and series that Prime, Netflix and Disney create. The direct effect of this was that there was no business to sell when they decided to shop the company. 4) Quibi suspended releasing new content during the recent protests, while continuing to burn investment cash. They should have adapted to the times. Even post 9/11 certain films were put on hold, but those were films insensitive to current events. I can't imagine all their content fell into that category. They still have $850 million in cash and have decided to call it. Sounds like Whitman and Katzenberg actually have a good shot at recouping some of their $10.5 and $5.5MM investment respectively. Which leads me to wonder whether they had that money to burn in the first place. Doesn't exactly feel like a "failure isn't an option" approach - and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot. Although the business model may be so fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I've described above, that a pivot isn't even feasible.
- TheCondor 6y agoAnyone here ever call it and offer to give back 50% of the money to the investors? The one time I've seen it done, it was taken as "heroic" and that exact same board approved a dramatic pivot which in turn watched that money and 3 more rounds be consumed by. "That CEO is a straight shooter to make a hard call that quickly... give him some more money..." All things being equal, I wonder what the content is really worth, that stuff typically doesn't age well so not maintaining the ownership may not have been a bad thing and it sounds like they recognized that it wasn't going to catch fire and so shutting it down makes sense. I expect the investment community will look upon it favorably. It's easy to criticize and I don't think I'd have ever paid $10 a month for it, but we also live in a world where there is TV streaming to gas pumps. I wonder what people will do when gas stations stop selling gas but it still takes 20minutes to fully charge your electric car...
- technick 6y agoWhoever did marketing for them was awful. I remember the first video I saw about Quibi and it didn't make sense what the video was about.
- arthurofbabylon 6y agoI actually appreciate that quibi exists, and no it was not obvious/certain at the outset that quibi would fail, despite what all of these reverse-Nostradamus’s say. Quibi pushed into new territory in a highly risky way - that’s cool. My only gripe is that it’s about low quality entertainment. I prefer we take these big risks with projects that might have truly consequential and positive impact: preventative health, air quality in cities like Santiago and Salt Lake City, ecological restoration near dense urban areas, better understanding of complex social dynamics, waste management, screenless recreation.
- rchaud 6y agoToo complicated. Big money ideas always fit on a napkin, haven't you heard? "Quibi - the TikTok of Netflix." Now that's a golden ticket idea.
- jcranmer 6y ago> Quibi pushed into new territory in a highly risky way - that’s cool. Well, the thing is they didn't. Short-form content isn't exactly a new concept; I've been watching short videos for years on Youtube and other sites. And the way that Big Hollywood executives chose to approach making this short-form content appears to have largely been "make a regular long-form content and chop it up into smaller pieces" which is a high risk move only in the way of the "That's a bold move Cotton" meme.
- draw_down 6y agoWas fun watching people attempt to defend this obvious flop. Bad enough idea, but boy did the timing work against them too.
- reggieband 6y agoI have to admit, while I loved the schadenfreude of watching Hollywood hubris collide with the terrible launch of Quibi - I am surprised that they are throwing in the towel so quickly. The basic premise of high-quality short-form content actually seems solid. I truly expected them to persist through the initial bad press and eventually run a decent if unremarkable business. In some ways it reminds me of Vine, Periscope, Musically and the other apps that preceded TikTok. Also reminds me of the quick demise of Mixer. Maybe it is the case of the right idea but at the wrong time. I can only guess the expenses were too high and they have no option to but to fold.
- rchaud 6y agoThey haven't been advertising for a good long time. I think they expected that with a big ad spend, they'd develop a user base and build awareness organically after that via word of mouth. That clearly didn't happen, so more advertising would be needed. At a certain point those ad bills add up, especially if they aren't able to convert enough free trial people into paid users.
- danso 6y agoThe Verge has a writeup: https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21527197/quibi-streaming-service-mobile-shutting-down-end-katzenberg https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21527197/quibi-streaming... They credit the WSJ (which may or may not be paywalled depending on referrer?): https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-problems-mount-11603301946 https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-p...
- perardi 6y agoSo, so many obvious failings, but the one that gets me: You couldn’t take screenshots to share. What absolute moron thought that would be a good idea? Presumably some Boomer who couldn’t be bothered to ask an intern what a meme is.
- rchaud 6y agoI think every service does this now. Netflix doesn't allow screenshots on mobile devices. Neither do Crave (in Canada) or Amazon Prime.
- vsskanth 6y agoI wonder how much of the 1.75 Billion was already spent. I can't believe how they raised so much money in the first place without any market validation whatsoever.
- martinesko36 6y agoApparently they only had 200mil available just a month ago, so most likely they burned through almost all of it. (source: https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/9/21/21449795/quibi-sale-video-buyers https://www.vox.com/recode/2020/9/21/21449795/quibi-sale-vid...)
- Osiris 6y agoThe CEO of Quibi, Meg Whitman, admitted to not being an entertainment enthusiast. [1] I realize that a company CEO doesn't need to be a subject matter expert, but when you're building a platform focused on millennials (mobile-first), it would help to have someone that can identify with the target audience. edit: And co-founder Katzenberg has his "emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by assistant" [2] [1] https://theweek.com/speedreads/923863/quibi-ceo-admits-not-really-entertainment-enthusiast https://theweek.com/speedreads/923863/quibi-ceo-admits-not-r... [2] https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm...
- mchusma 6y agoI think this hits the core of the problem on the head, that Katzenberg and Whitman thought they knew what millennials wanted, but they simply did not. They thought millennials wanted "shorter" based on the success of tiktok/instagram/etc. But their content was too long to be short. And the "golden age of TV" we are in basically proves that people don't really want shorter in scripted content. If anything, we want deeper stories. Novellas have never outsold novels. Movies were an outlier for a while, based on the fact it was so hard to produce content, but even movies are now becoming trilogy's+. Youtube is hugely successful because it satisfies niche content, the length is irrelevant. They thought it should be "mobile", but by limiting it to mobile they meant that you could only watch part of the time. Netflix is perfectly fine on mobile. The switching back and forth thing feels like a novelty like 1 time then you just do whatever you want and stick with that. Its also hard for creators as you don't know how people will use it, so you have to make it "worse in landscape" and "worse in portrait" so people can watch on either method. I absolutely LOVE people taking big risks on ideas. This was just a bad idea from the start. I wish they would have blown $1.8B on some shoot the moon healthcare idea or something.
- notJim 6y ago> But their content was too long to be short Totally right, imo. I might be old and out of touch, but to me 10 minutes is way too long for content on mobile, and short enough to be kind of annoying on anything else. I'd rather watch a 25 or 30 minute show if I want something short on TV.
- martinesko36 6y agoWhat a colossal disaster.
- notatoad 6y agoAs predicted by everybody who had ever heard of quibi
- martinesko36 6y agoAs a retrospective, what do you think drove those investors to go against all common sense? Was it FOMO? Regret of not investing in Netflix?
- notatoad 6y agoI am not an investor and don't know what the pitch was, but as a casual observer who was just seeing media coverage, it seemed like before launch it was a pretty vague "new online video streaming service headed by Jeffrey Katzenberg" without details, and they raised a whole lot of money before settling on what the product was actually going to be. I've got to imagine there's a bunch of investors out there who were pretty disappointed in what got launched
- neonate 6y agohttps://archive.is/Lyj72 https://archive.is/Lyj72
- danhak 6y agoI hope this isn't too harsh, but I really struggle to see why Meg Whitman continues to be hired in these roles and what she brings to the table. eBay was the world's biggest online marketplace while Amazon was still selling books. eBay could've been Amazon, and perhaps would have been, given a leader with the right vision. Her tenure at HP was disastrous. And now the Quibi debacle. Can someone please clue me in? I don't know as much as I'd like about her career.
- bluedevil2k 6y agoDon’t forget about her disastrous governor campaign.
- rchaud 6y agoHasn't Ebay been consistently profitable under her tenure? I also imagine the company did pretty well after spinning off PayPal after acquiring it in 2003. As for HP, has anyone done a good job there? Carly Fiorina had the Compaq debacle, while Leo Apotheker wasted $9 billion buying Autonomy to turn the company into the American SAP.
- danpalmer 6y agoQuibi launched their Apple TV app yesterday.
- chrisweekly 6y ago"The Fugitive" was actually pretty entertaining. Oh well.
- baobabKoodaa 6y agoSo let me get this straight: a video streaming service fails, and they're blaming... the pandemic? I don't think there has ever been a time in history when people have had more time to sit around watching videos. I actually wanted to give my money to Quibi, but they made it too hard to do so. I really wanted to see the new Reno 911 skits, and I didn't find them anywhere besides Quibi. I was ready to pay and I tried to find an option to watch Quibi content on my desktop, but it seemed like there wasn't any. Only mobile. Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.
- Traster 6y agoIt was mobile first, so I could see how you could argue that a pandemic was bad for a platform built around mobile. Having said that, the management seems to have been crap too and it seems crazy that they weren't able to acqui-quit.
- fastball 6y agoI don't know anyone that has used their phone less during lockdown.
- Twirrim 6y agoI haven't used it for watching video media, that's gone way down now that I'm not commuting. When I watch videos now it's almost always on the TV instead. I'm not even sure if my streaming device supports Quibi.
- redisman 6y agoIsn't the whole pitch that they're bite-sized? So you'll watch a clip on the toilet or while waiting for your turn in the covid test line. Mobile games and most apps are doing better than ever. This whole thing had a very "fellow kids" vibe, so I think the content must have been the main sticking point.
- mrkwse 6y agoThe Verge article on this raised the point that shortform video is a crowded market with TikTok, YouTube, etc. which I'd agree is probably what crowded Quibi out. I've just started a YouTube Premium subscription and expect I'll continue paying for that once the free trial ends, whereas even at half the price, Quibi just didn't have the content or familiarity to get my money at the end of the trial. One thing I do have to commend Quibi for, however, is how well they reversioned their video content. I think they will be seen as a little ahead of the competition there (possibly before their time). Against other content houses that will have significantly more footage to get through (and/or less resources for this task). I think the different versions (e.g. portrait/landscape for Quibi) will be a little way off being that common. I expect computer vision tooling will enable it more broadly when it can at least expedite the process considerably (which probably isn't a huge distance off although then the blocker is organisational processes around publishing video).
- sjg007 6y agoReversioning is the key here. Quibi could become a $100B company just on that. The portrait / landscape mode should be gamified.
- Nextgrid 6y agoShort-form social media is a booming and crowded market. Short-form video is not. In the former case it's mostly social media, the main value here is memes and/or following creators/influencers; there is never a storyline or a "show" to follow per-se. Quibi's business model would be that people would not only be interested in a storyline contained within bite-sized chunks of video but that they would actually pay for it. This is a flawed idea; when it comes to a story people want it to go as long as possible (and the pause button is a thing that exists already), there's no reason to want artificially-constrained storylines when you can get the longform equivalent on Netflix for the same price.
- harpua 6y agoI actually do think there is a market for bite-sized chunks of video with a unifying storyline. There's a reason that all tv show episodes aren't just one long episode. So why not push the boundaries of that and break up a normal tv show episode into smaller ones? It seems there are 3 different types of videos with decreasing segment (or episode) lengths: movies, tv shows, bite-sized shows. Each has its own place for user needs. I think sometimes people don't want to (or don't have time) watch a full movie, so they opt for a tv episode. Similarly, sometimes they don't want to watch a full tv episode.
- perardi 6y agoSo, so many obvious failings, but the one that gets me: You couldn’t take screenshots to share. What genius thought that would be a good idea?
- will_pseudonym 6y agoThat's odd for social media to do, but not "odd"* for Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime etc to do. It's interesting which camp they thought they were in. * I do find it odd and not a good idea for those entities to disallow screenshots, but it certainly is the norm in that world.
- m0llusk 6y agoThe "Some More News" channel on YouTube had a detailed piece on Quibi some time ago which does well at explaining the context of all of this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc
- aaron695 6y agoQuibi at its core is brilliant. 10 min episodes and you can finish a season in a night is exactly what people want. Stuff like flipping screens and 'phone only', not so. But they were very easy to pivot on. (Which they did) So you might think you are smart saying this is obvious, but it's not. It's only an amount of content issue. Which we also know is solvable. But it's not clear exactly how.
- Ansil849 6y agoThere were so many things wrong with Quibi, just off the top of my head: - Initially restricting allowed devices to mobile only. - Flagrant nepotism, like Reese Witherspoon being given $6 million to narrate a documentary miniseries...with her husband coincidentally being the Head of Talent Acquisition at Quibi. - Seemingly not having a single critically-acclaimed show. Quibi's strategy was seemingly to just dump money on A-list actors, not A-list writers and it made all of the shows (or at least the dozen I sampled) a wasted effort. - (Allegedly) stealing the video-rotation technology from another company, and being mired in a lawsuit about it.
- input_sh 6y agoAlso just blatantly stealing show ideas from YouTube creators instead of just... you know, hiring that YouTube channel to do something they've been doing for a decade (https://twitter.com/E_I_T/status/1247221678712619008 https://twitter.com/E_I_T/status/1247221678712619008). Even the damn title of the series and aesthetics are exactly the same. Also the idea of dropping one episode every week. Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week. That's twice as short as any TV show out there, not to mention Netflix releasing entire seasons at once. Also preventing users from taking screenshots, which is just stupid. It just helps if people share your content to other people.
- Ansil849 6y ago> Also just blatantly stealing show ideas from YouTube creators Wow, had no idea about this. Despicable conduct. > Also preventing users from taking screenshots Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this point too. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot. Really, when all these missteps are stacked up, how was anyone thinking that this company wouldn't fail? I know hind sight is 20/20, but these all should have been immediate red flags.
- tmpz22 6y ago> Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week I agree with all your points except this one. Rick and Morty is essentially 20 minute episodes released weekly, after commercials. If you took out long pauses, transitions, and other filling, I'm sure you could get it down to 15 minutes of punch. I'd add a lot of video creators like game of zones, alt-shift-x, theinternethistorian, also fill the punch of 15-25 minute content released weekly/monthly, are ravenously popular. There is room for ~10-20 minute content but it may be harder to market/monetize.
- dredmorbius 6y agoPaywall: https://archive.fo/jZA9Z https://archive.fo/jZA9Z
- partiallypro 6y agoQuibi was DOA. I honestly don't know why people thought it would survive. You can scroll 15 minutes on Tiktok and be more entertained.
- TheMagicHorsey 6y agoThey launched in a kind of weird way. One would think that if they raised 2B they would start really small and test their hypothesis with a few marquee shows, and then iterate to find a product that meets the tastes and demands of the consumer. Instead it feels like they just made a lot of assumptions and built a sophisticated expensive end product ... and consumers didn't show up. That's a lot of money up in smoke.
- jarjoura 6y agoIt's hard to know exactly what about Quibi failed. Argument 1: No one wants short-form video. YouTube has been the master at this market, TikTok too! I think there is plenty of space for more short-form content. Argument 2: No one wants to pay for streaming content. Netflix and Hulu have plenty of varying length content that people willingly pay for. Ultimately, Quibi itself was weird. Correct me if I'm wrong, but their marketing strategy was, high end short form content, code for Hollywooy-esque content. There's nothing wrong with this style of content, but when I watch something short-form, I expect it to keep my attention when I'm actively holding my phone. YouTube and TikTok content are both edited to be high paced and leave little room for air. That keeps it engaging when you're on your phone because you just can't look away. If I wanted to relax after a long day, I want to sit on the couch and turn on the TV. That's where typical Hollywood content fits in. Lots of space in between spoken dialog, music, and more reflective pacing. Quibi tried to give you TV pacing, but short-form format and ultimately that was rejected in the market. Why on earth didn't they test this thesis before blowing through a billion dollars?
- ouid 6y ago>Why on earth didn't they test this thesis before blowing through a billion dollars? I think we're looking at the test... Something something desperate venture capital.
- baja_blast 6y agoI feel Katzenberg over estimates how much people care about big celebrity names, their entire focus was "how many celebrities can we cram into our shows", rather than making the stories/content compelling. The obnoxious advertising of celebrities being like "Hey look at me!" only signaled how shallow and bad their content must be. Celebs often let their success go to their head thinking they're the reason why movies they have been in were successful. But the real reason a movie is successful has more to do with directing, writing, editing and all of the background work that was put into it. Why subscribe to Quibi to see Celebs embarrass themselves with cringe content, when you can see them do that on instagram for free!
- DLA 6y agooh man I agree. Most of the content was utter crap. A few shows were really excellent but there was a ton of hapless “big star” plus cheap comedy or lame variety shown. T-mobile gave it for free, had it not I would not have paid a dime. The Shape of Pasta was an outstanding travel/foodie show in same vane as Anthony Bordain’s show. A few of the thrillers were good and that’s about it.
- wnevets 6y agoIf a service without any users shuts down does it make a sound? I still don't know why I should've cared about it or it's content. Why should I care about Disney+? It has tons of Disney content. Why should I care about Shudder? It has tons of horror content. Why should I care about Quibi?
- nullsense 6y agoI must say... I've seen their ads a lot on YouTube and I had no idea their format and business model was fundamentally different from Netflix. I thought - ok, another Netflix... Reading the comments I can see it was mobile-only and short episodes targeted at people riding public transport (or similar short duration where what you can do is very limited and you want to entertain yourself). Seems like a big failure marketing-wise.
- chillfox 6y agoEveryone keeps saying they were optimised for vertical videos. No, they weren’t, they had normal horizontal videos that they cropped the sides off in vertical, and it obvious from their own marketing stuff that the video weren’t shot with this cropping in mind. The experience would have been shit. Second, they didn’t create short episodes for quick watching, they created full length movies and just carved them up, again this was obvious from their own marketing stuff.
- drewcon 6y agoWhy hasn’t tiktok bought them out for pennies? Seems a natural fit for the content.
- GoodJokes 6y agoShort vids with celebrities is not cool enough to pay for.
- bloody-crow 6y agoThey were a business for roughly a quibi
- jldugger 6y agoHow long is a Quibi? About two years it seems.
- kp98 6y ago>> "Sign up for us because celebrities !!!!" lol, its not even a meme anymore
- 01100011 6y agoAm I the only one who never heard of Quibi until today? I feel like I'm in their target market yet I've never heard their name until I saw them in the news.
- ykevinator 6y agoCheaper better or faster is the only thing that eventually succeeds. Not sure quibi was any of these.
- jaimex2 6y agoNever heard of it
- wmij 6y agoMaybe, I'm being somewhat superficial but I can't help to wonder that the name of the company/app "Quibi" only hurt their launch and not helped aside from other factors pointed out. I wonder how many times in talking about the app have people needed to spell it out or say it's pronounced like "kwibee" not "keebee", etc. I actually needed to go to wikipedia.org to see the exact pronunciation. So much about the branding reminds me of the "Cuil" search engine failure a decade ago. I remember seeing the original name "Cuill" in some of my request logs and thinking at the time that it was some malicious DDOS bot that wanted to see my site as "see you ill". First time that I saw in the news about "Quibi" I immediately thought of the whole "Cuil" search engine failure. Not a great first impression, but that it was.
- pier25 6y agoI thought the same. Both the name and the brand seem terrible for the intended audience and product.
- SilasX 6y agoEspecially since it's supposed to be a contraction of "quick bites".
- allenu 6y agoI also think the strange name had an effect. Whenever I read about it, first I didn't know how it was pronounced, nor what it was exactly, nor why I would care. The ads would show someone watching a video and laughing, but... we already have other video services, so why was this any different? Anyway, you could say we now all know how it's pronounced. As of today "Quibi" is pronounced dead.
- perardi 6y agoRemember when Verizon tried basically the same thing with go90? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90 No? You don’t? Not a surprise. And nobody will remember Quibi either.
- lovefeature 6y agoTry snapfeel.com ,it's better than Tiktok and Quibi
- dcchambers 6y agoWell I don't know what they spent that $2B on but I hope it wasn't marketing because I've never even heard of Quibi until today.
- KoftaBob 6y agoWhat a colossal waste of money on a lazy, uninspired, and half-assed concept. Always so frustrating to see hundreds of millions blown on nonsense like this when there are truly innovative startups that would do so much more with that money.
- adamsvystun 6y agoGood job for trying something new! Did not work out this time, better luck in the future.
- peter303 6y agoPerhaps bottom-up approaches are better: build something you really think is fun, then monetize it later. Social networking (facebook), picture-sharing (snap and Instagram), video sharing (youTube). Having a bunch of corporate executives dictating a feature set from the too-down is less successful.
- nojvek 6y agoReminds me of Juicero. I’ve always wondered how VCs dice our millions without doing their dilligence whether an idea is validated or not. At what point does a VC that randomly bets on prospects beat the average?
- NoblePublius 6y agoWho?
- Terretta 6y ago> The company spent aggressively to develop its content. Its lineup of star-studded programming included a court show featuring Chrissy Teigen, a romantic comedy with Anna Kendrick ... Sounds like top shelf content, let's try a review: "My most recent pick was Dummy, a show where Anna Kendrick becomes friends with her boyfriend’s sex doll. When I turned my phone horizontally, suddenly I could see a widescreen version of the same series: The sex doll’s legs splayed further along the floor, and in the background I could now see Donal Logue, the actor who plays the boyfriend. ... The episode of Dummy lasted six minutes, just long enough for me to think, What is this?, when I realized that the boyfriend was a barely fictionalized version of Emmy-winning TV writer Dan Harmon. Then it ended." -- https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-bites-are-quick-and-bad.html https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-bites-are-quick-and-bad.... Okay, bad roulette spin. Here's another view: "“Dummy” is a semi-autobiographical comedy from Cody Heller, whom Kendrick plays, with Donal Logue portraying her real-life partner Dan Harmon, the Emmy-winning showrunner of “Community” and “Rick & Morty.” The 10-episode series sees Cody imagining that her boyfriend’s sex doll is sentient and high jinks ensue. It is breezy viewing at an average of seven minutes apiece, but the show deserves Emmy recognition for how its frames are so deliberately composed in service of advancing the art form. Relatively few shows contend for Best Short Form Comedy/Drama Series; that the category exists is a testament to the academy’s continual acknowledgement of the evolution of television, which “Dummy” embodies." -- https://www.goldderby.com/article/2020/anna-kendrick-dummy-quibi/ https://www.goldderby.com/article/2020/anna-kendrick-dummy-q...
- smartbit 6y agohttp://archive.is/GaPhu http://archive.is/GaPhu
- twostorytower 6y agoThey were buying NBA finals ads just two weeks ago. What kind of company is evaluating shutting down and not pulling its ad dollars.
- yalogin 6y agoOne of the most poorly executed ideas I have seen. The idea itself was workshopped and feels forced. I wouldn't have picked that to begin with. They just didn't know what people want.
- coolandsmartrr 6y agoA more resilient version of Quibi has been operating in Japan for 5 years. It's called "C Channel"[1], founded by the founder of the LINE messaging app Akira Morikawa. C Channel also presents short videos in vertical format. It differs from Quibi that they have narrowed their target viewer on young women who want makeup tutorials. Their production cost is probably cheaper: they feature influencers instead of A-list celebrities. They started small, and still serve that specific niche for women who want to be fashionable. Quibi may have fared better if they likewise focused on a specific niche of viewers. [1] https://www.cchan.tv/ https://www.cchan.tv/
- probably_wrong 6y agoEveryone here is talking about the business model, but how about the actual content? Every single article I read about Quibi before today was about how bad their series are. And while I haven't seen a single show myself, the worst offenders do seem like the type of trash that made people run away from regular TV to begin with. Chrissy's Court, Gayme show, Murder House Flip... I imagine you can make a bad idea work with good content, and you can make bad content work with a good, convenient platform. But I suppose there is not much you can do when the entire internet is complaining about both of them.
- hathym 6y agoWatch this [1] to understand why Quibi shutdown (the short answer: their content sucks) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYoyN-4U7U4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hYoyN-4U7U4
- KnobbleMcKnees 6y agoI wonder if companies they can start offering Whitman amazing executive packages to _not_ be their CEO. Her track record is attrocious. I say this as someone still reeling from the death of Palm.
- gregjw 6y agoImagine having a better opportunity than the global pandemic to launch a streaming service crammed with original content and then missing the shot completely...
- uptown 6y ago"Quibi made their “episodes” 11 minutes to avoid paying union writers. Everyone should MC Hammer dance on their grave." "By playing credits between each act, instead of commercials, Quibi claimed a 10 episode season was actually 40 “low budget under 12 minute episodes”, allowing them to skirt SAG (actors union) and WGA (writers union) minimums. They were a scab-based business model." https://twitter.com/LukeXCunningham/status/1318976662139146241 https://twitter.com/LukeXCunningham/status/13189766621391462...
- michaelmior 6y agoI tried the free trial of Quibi and actually liked a lot of the content on there. Not enough though to pay for an extra streaming service. I hope with the sale though that somehow the content moves to another platform.
- thrownaway954 6y agois it just me or did anyone just not get what was different about them? i had a debate with some yesterday trying to justify why them over netflix or any other existing streaming service for that matter and they couldn't, i couldn't either.
- helen___keller 6y agoI think Quibi did a lot wrong, but I do think there's some truth that the ubiquitous "traditional" TV segment is just waiting to be disrupted. I don't sit down to watch shows for 30 minutes. Sometimes I'll binge for 2 hours and get 4 different rising-action-falling-action cycles and 4 different cliffhangers trying to keep me on for the next episode, which I was planning on doing anyways. Sometimes I'll watch for 45 minutes, get halfway through a second episode but have to shut it off for one reason or another, and when I come back the next day I feel disoriented because the plot cycle is built to assume an uninterrupted segment. I don't think the solution here is 10 minute episodes per se, but I think the flow of storytelling in modern TV series is waiting for some innovation to bring it to the 21st century. A great example of innovation in storytelling is the Witcher 3. Everytime I boot the game up, during the loading sequence I get a 15 second voiced over "recap" where Geralt informs me about where the main storyline is and what we need to do next, whereas in traditional TV segments I'm given a recap every 30 minutes of progress regardless of where in the show I start and stop watching.
- circa 6y agoGood riddance. I wanted to watch it on my Apple TV and they didn't make it happen until my trial ran out. Oh well! I hope the content will be available elsewhere in the future.
- code4tee 6y agoNot to sound harsh but the company just seemed to have the wrong leadership making the wrong decisions at the wrong time. Failing with a well capitalized streaming service during a pandemic is a bit like failing to sell ice cold lemonade to people in the desert. Sure there are probably other players, but if you’re not at least doing reasonably well then you’re probably doing something terribly wrong.
- IndexPointer 6y agoNo! Not quibi!
- DeonPenny 6y agoWould a movie studio work if it moved to san francisco and just tried to make it work. This was people thinking something really difficult and risky was really easy and safe. Its not.