
The fall of Quibi: how did a starry $1.75B Netflix rival crash so fast? - MindGods
https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2020/jun/28/quibi-netflix-jeffrey-katzenberg-crash
======
whack
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".

~~~
rwhitman
I've been a tech consultant in LA for more or less 15 years at this point.

A very large portion of well funded, early stage startups that crash and burn
in LA are typically because media people have a hard time conceptualizing lean
startup, and rapid iteration etc. Over the years I've accepted it's not so
much hubris as it is entertainment is just a different industry with a
different way of doing business and people who found success in entertainment
think that method they achieved translates to tech startups, when it
unfortunately doesn't.

In Hollywood you put all this time and money into one big event like a film,
or an album or a pilot and people scoop it up due to marketing. They consume
it, then they are done. If they like it they ask for more. So if you have the
money you spend all of the money at once to make the best thing possible, put
as much marketing and PR against it as possible and people will consume it
anyway. Usually you make some of your money back. If consumers ask for more,
that's a bonus. Then you go out and raise more for the sequel or the next
album or whatever.

Of course tech is different - you can't put all that money into the first
iteration and expect it to pay off. You need to stretch it out over many
experiments and control burn over years. It's just a totally different
financial model and business plan. There are so so many Quibis out there that
never got past private alpha / beta. The execs spend YEARS crafting that
perfect alpha, open it up privately to friends and family, it flops and then
they throw in the towel just like that. I've seen it more times than I can
count now

~~~
xeromal
Your comment makes me wonder if the tech agile model would work in movies or
TV. Imagine if you got bites of a show every week and based on your feedback,
the show evolved it's direction. Sounds interesting and strange.

~~~
onlyrealcuzzo
This is more or less how TV series work. You put out a season, you get
feedback, then you develop the next season.

I doubt it's practical for individual episodes yet. You would likely need a
month between episodes to do this, and people would just forget about your
show in that time.

~~~
catgary
Aren't TV pilots individual episodes?

~~~
lobf
They are, but there's a lot of lead time that goes in to shooting the pilot,
and then even more in planning the rest of the season if it gets picked back
up. They end up released at the same time, but that doesn't mean that a year
hasn't passed since they started pre production on the pilot.

It's simply infeasible to adjust a show to fan feedback on a weekly basis I
think. You'd need either a really small show, or one where most of the
elements (sets, lighting, wardrobe, etc.) stay pretty consistent between
episodes, then the work would just be a matter of tweaking the story, rather
than figuring out how to get the whole crew out to all the locations required
to make a traditional tv show.

~~~
walshemj
From listing to some of the director/producers commentary on episodic tv there
is a lot of prep work that goes into a show and then you have 7 days to shoot
the episode.

So you cant really change that much week to week.

~~~
lobf
Yup, exactly. I work in production, and you need so much time to prep all of
the aspects of a single day of production, and then working each day in to a
rational schedule to get everything you need. You can't just change everything
on a whim. (not without lots of time and money)

------
ogre_codes
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.

------
elcomet
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
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-...](https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-
us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-use-Chromecast-or-Apple-AirPlay-with-my-Quibi-
app-)

~~~
Terretta
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.

~~~
donavanm
> 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?

------
hexmiles
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
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.

~~~
geerlingguy
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
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!”

------
newbie789
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
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?

------
erikig
_“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
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
^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.

------
bcrescimanno
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
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 ...

------
sgt101
Some things work, other things don't work.

You find out by trying.

The thing is not to use $1bn to try.

~~~
coldcode
Or pay $6M for a single minimal content.

~~~
C1sc0cat
$6M buys you a lot of David Attenborough for VO work.

------
dawg-
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
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.

------
spzb
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
> 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.

------
bobblywobbles
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
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.

------
mason55
> _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
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.

~~~
wcfields
I have a friend who is an editor on a topical semi-daily current-affairs show
on Quibi. It's all done manually and they now have a semi-established style
now, however a lot of it is cropping or shrink-to-fit with a background.

The fictional series, however, are shot with an almost 1:1 ratio since the
safe-zone is ridiculously small.

------
iwasakabukiman
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
> 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.

------
wahlrus
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.

~~~
gumby
Classic _hollywood_ hubris, figuring enough spent on marketing and celebs will
sell anything.

------
TeaDrunk
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.

~~~
TotempaaltJ
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
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
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.

------
jedberg
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.

------
russellbeattie
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.

------
Apofis
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.

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

~~~
zemo
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
The title says it crashed.

------
cududa
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

------
pkamb
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.

------
hogFeast
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.

------
whatgoodisaroad
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
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.

------
KoftaBob
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.

------
Wowfunhappy
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
I believe they have added Chromecast support

~~~
Wowfunhappy
Thanks, but that defeats the point. If I’m at home, I’d rather watch a proper
30-60 minute show.

------
dig6x
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.

------
diogenescynic
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.

------
mizay7
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
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.

------
pkulak
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)

~~~
SilasX
Thanks! That’s a great overview! (and I say that as someone that generally
doesn’t like getting journalism through videos.)

------
blhack
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.

------
danpalmer
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.

~~~
shrew
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)

------
ponker
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.

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

~~~
elwell
I must have seen their (annoying, to me) ads over a 100 times already.

~~~
s1mon
Where? I've only managed to read about it in the media. Zero ads.

~~~
elwell
Either sling or hulu, forget...

------
frsandstone
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-...](https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-trough-
of-sorrow/)

~~~
ogre_codes
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.

------
rvz
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
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.

------
LockAndLol
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.

------
cvburgess
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.

------
jhfdbkofdcho
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.

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

------
nathanvanfleet
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.

------
ibdf
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.

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

------
sjg007
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.

------
jariel
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.

------
zachware
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.

------
dhosek
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.

------
benjaminsuch
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.

------
knolax
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.

~~~
catsarebetter
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.

------
Causality1
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
Spotify?

------
dirkg
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.

------
fasicle
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.

------
DeonPenny
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.

------
npunt
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.

------
chadlavi
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!

------
mrnobody_67
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.

------
ekanes
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.

------
jccalhoun
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.

------
zem
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.

------
dzonga
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.

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

------
mrnobody_67
Whatifi is way better.... interactive movie games that you watch with your
friends.

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

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

------
ryanmarsh
Because the terrible name?

------
tommy15
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)

------
admax88q
> Quibi

Who?

------
techlaw
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...](https://www.iheart.com/content/2019-09-11-new-tv-show-called-
murder-house-flip-will-be-your-new-obsession/)

~~~
HeyLaughingBoy
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 :-)

~~~
techlaw
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
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...

