Quibi

» see quibi.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

quibi launched on 6 april 2020. the pitch was hollywood-quality short-form video for mobile only. ten-minute episodes. premium production. jeffrey katzenberg, the dreamworks co-founder, raised 1.75 billion dollars on the strength of his name. meg whitman, formerly of ebay and hp, ran it as ceo. the proprietary turnstyle technology let you rotate your phone mid-video and the framing would switch from vertical to horizontal seamlessly. nobody asked for this feature. quibi spent significant engineering on it anyway.

the content library at launch was 175 shows totaling around 8,500 episodes. quibi paid hollywood prices for hollywood talent. chrissy teigen had a court show. liam hemsworth ran from people in a thriller. the spend on commissioned content alone was over a billion dollars before the first user signed up. the subscription cost 4.99 a month with ads, 7.99 without.

quibi did not launch in turkey. the service was us-only at launch with plans to add markets later that never came. for me as a non-us viewer the entire arc happened at a distance, as a series of headlines about a billion-dollar streaming launch followed by, within months, headlines about that same launch shutting down. the only quibi i ever interacted with was the news cycle of its failure.

~ the record ~

~ the final blow ~

quibi launched into the first month of the covid-19 lockdowns. the entire premise of the product was on-the-go mobile viewing, between the metro and the office. nobody was on the metro. nobody was going to the office. people were home with a tv and a laptop, with time to watch full-length shows. quibi was selling a use case the world had momentarily lost.

the early reviews were brutal. the turnstyle gimmick did not justify the workflow. the shows were average at best, expensive at worst. the app launched without a way to cast to a tv, which the company added under pressure but late. by the end of summer 2020 quibi had roughly 500,000 paying subscribers against a goal of 7.4 million. the math was clear. on 21 october 2020 katzenberg and whitman announced the company would shut down. the service went dark on 1 december 2020. the lifespan was seven months and twenty-six days.

in january 2021 roku bought the entire 75-program library for under 100 million dollars. the shows were rebranded as roku originals. the company that produced them no longer existed.

~ the legacy ~

the cautionary tale about pre-launch funding. quibi raised 1.75 billion dollars before they had any subscribers or any data on whether the format worked. then covid broke the use case anyway. the lesson is that the size of your initial raise can become the thing that traps you. if quibi had launched smaller, with a hundred million instead of a billion, they could have iterated. with a billion already spent on commissioned content they had no flexibility.

the death of "short-form premium." the entire category died with quibi. tiktok was already eating short-form video, but tiktok was free and ugc. nobody since 2020 has seriously tried to sell ten-minute prestige shows on a phone for a monthly fee. the model is just gone. quibi was the test and the test failed.

katzenberg's name. before quibi, jeffrey katzenberg was the co-founder of dreamworks animation, a hollywood power broker for thirty years. after quibi, his name in tech press carries the quibi association. the failure was so public and so expensive that it overrode the prior career. for an industry that runs on reputation, this was the most expensive single piece of brand damage of the early 2020s.

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