Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Quibi’s Rough Start

Quibi's content isn't really comparable to traditional TV serials, especially the bingeable experience as cultivated by Netflix. It's for people to catch an episode on daily subway/car commutes. Similarly, podcast listening has reportedly gone down during quarantine: https://wwd.com/business-news/media/coronavirus-media-trends...

It's not the right format for sitting at home. It's short 8 minute episodes that come out once a day. It would be perfect for commuting on public transit but nobody is doing that at the moment so they have a problem.

It's a shame because I think they have some surprisingly good content (When the Streetlights go on was surprisingly dark and complex, The Most Dangerous Game was gripping if not predictable). However, it feels strictly less efficient than TikTok because they're never going to have UGC. Most of the content is your standard schlock that directly competes with quick, inane UGC you'd see on TikTok. Who do you think will be able to more sustainably and profitably operate: a company that relies on expensive and complex physical production for their content, or one that gets it for free in essentially limitless quantities with a vast dataset to exquisitely target each user's preferences.

It's not a perfect comparison because TikTok is ad supported and Quibi is a subscription service, but maybe that's the problem: they're not competing with Netflix, they're actually competing with TikTok and Instagram and maybe their product and business model should align with them instead.

It seems like they were banking on people being attracted to higher quality content than your traditional Youtube/TikTok/Instagram stuff, but it's not clear to me that people are actually buying into that strategy. Google tried something similar with Youtube Red (taking popular content creators and giving them professional production and then charging for access) but I'm not sure how that initiative has panned out.