The fall of Quibi: how did a starry $1.75B Netflix rival crash so fast?
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
> 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".
Edit: my point is, yes, it's easy in hindsight to think it would be a success (and surely, a lot of things help). But HBO Go enjoys much less success (and has a lot of technical issues)
Tidal was built to compete with Spotify, see where it went.
Quibi was interesting bec it was trying to be something that no one else was doing, that requires more than an s3 bucket behind a Netflix clone.
All the other things they tried were foolish and self-defeating: mobile-only (can't watch on my laptop or TV, which makes it harder to watch with a friend), no screenshots (no sharing/memes to promote conversation about the app or content), etc.
There is an ocean of short-form content creators on YouTube, many of them quite talented, who are increasingly desperate for some kind of alternative platform. It would've been so much cheaper and more effective to scoop up a handful of the better ones to create exclusives than to bank the farm on the waning star-power of establishment Hollywood folk. I don't really understand who the target audience is supposed to be.
I feel bad for the handful of decent shows (there must be a few right?) that are stuck on this weird patronizing-feeling platform. "I, just like you fellow kids, enjoy Music-Band and short-form video content on the Cell-Phone, and Celebrities!" platform.
From my understanding, Quibi is a unique usage model, with unproven content, neither of which has initially panned out.
That's the entire point. You don't throw billions at something new -- you prove it out first and then throw billions at it.
And since they already had the content and the marketing channels, the only thing they had to spend real money on is engineering. There's also a lot of cachet attached to working for Disney so I bet hiring talent was not an issue.
I'm guessing they would love for Disney+ to replace DVD/Blu-ray sales. Rather than making a one time sale, the customer pays for it every month! Forever!
That’s pretty much the idea of supply side and “trickle down“ economics. People with capital are the most important players. People who do the work are not important and replaceable.
I had a vague idea of bread crumbs falling off the table of the 'lords' to be consumed by the 'populace'.
My idea was : someone buys a multi-million Yacht, well they need a captain, cook and other staff to maintain their ship. The wealth (from buying a luxury item) trickles down to the employees. Of course, this was a simple intuition and the idea had no formal definition for me.
> Years ago, this column challenged anybody to quote any economist outside of an insane asylum who had ever advocated this "trickle-down" theory. Some readers said that somebody said that somebody else had advocated a "trickle-down" policy. But they could never name that somebody else and quote them.
https://www.creators.com/read/thomas-sowell/01/14/the-trickl...
No, but plenty of economists have used the phrases "supply-side economics" and "Laffer Curve" to discuss (and advocate) the policies that "trickle down" was coined to disparage.
It should be taken as seriously as if a physics PhD tried to persuade your state that it should use solar power to convert lead into gold.
I think I first heard of Quibi from their superbowl ad. That right there is a red flag. There's a certain class of people who think the thing that they happen to do is the most important thing in the world. You have MBA types who argue "good managers can manage anything" (ie you don't need domain knowledge). You have marketers who think that any success is purely a function of the marketing put into it. Worse, any successful launch (eg Disney+) will be seen as a success for marketing.
Time and time again we've seen throwing money at marketing fail to sell a bad product.
The whole focus on celebrities for Quibi I find interesting, particularly in light of this comment about where the money came from. I'm imagining people who are just horribly out of touch in that they come from an era when celebrity endorsements can sell anything. Or maybe it's people who just want to hang out with celebrities. What better way than to run a "studio"?
I mean, Reese Witherspoon getting paid $6m to do a voice over for a show about cheetahs? Wow.
The more I see about Meg Whitman the more I'm convinced she's just an idiot who happened to be in the right place at the right time (with HP). Like I'm honestly shocked eBay went anywhere with her at the helm. Because what else has she done? Tried to buy political office (and failed). Quibi. RIP.
>>Staffers reportedly “seethed”[1] at Reese Witherspoon’s $6m salary ... (Witherspoon’s husband Jim Toth is the head of talent and content acquisition at the company.)
Nepotism, much?
[1] https://pagesix.com/2020/06/02/quibi-staffers-seethe-at-rees...
That's not an accident.
Good managers can manage anything, if the thing has potential. What they can't do is succeed by managing nothing.
Well, in this case at least she partnered with the right person. I am not sure if anyone in Hollywood raises money better than Jeffrey Katzenberg (both for business and politics).
If I had run eBay and HP I think I’d be trying to hide that from my resume.
Companies and funders go back to these people with opportunities because they understand some parts of the market that people like me don't (finance, how to make these top level connections). I think like F Scott Fitzgerald kind of said,"Let me tell you about the ... [Ceos]. They are different from you and me". [1] It's fun to switch up that quote, but I do think they think of companies and strategies a lot differently than I do. I think about what is good technology, what will programmers use to build solutions.
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/10367-let-me-tell-you-about...
She was lucky to be hired at EBay, but growing a small company into $8B in revenues is a highly credible act that validates a certain set of qualifications that are essentially rare.
Nobody really knows what the next big thing is going to be, but some people are strong in some areas. They theoretically make a good team on paper. But it's hard to know what the reality is.
He is content oriented, she is operations oriented, I'm not sure if anyone was behind the end-to-end experience.
That said, hard work and good decisions are also important. =)
Eric Jackson's book, Musk's biography, and other sources paint Paypal as an organizational mess. Successful mergers are no small order. Whitman succeeded.
But now the market is verrmy different. You are either going for niche ( educational, documentaries, animal planet.. you name it ) or attempt to compete with big boys, which invariably means heavy investment in licensing deals.
I personally think someone did not do their research.
Quibi is different in that they tried to make a bunch of new content from scratch, and no one cared. They weren't tapping into an already existing well of demand for specific content.
Instead, there wasn't anything there that people already knew about/wanted. Consequently, there was no reason for people to want the platform. (i.e. Why do I want to pay for this new thing?!?)
Personally, I found Quibi's advertising so annoying and pointless that I would likely never be interested in looking past it to see what the platform was all about.
On the other hand, if they had started pushing shows/creators as an anchor for the platform (with something like an "only on Quibi ..." branding say) it might have been more interesting. I.e. make the platform secondary to the content, convince people they want the content, and that gives them a reason to look at the platform in the first place.
Basically, the consumers don't care about the platform itself so much as they care about what it provides them.
I'm not sure if that ad was targeted at Americans, at British, or at Americans who watch British stuff, but I can't imagine how it would come across well at any of those target audiences.
This is more like Vessel, the more tech-backed version of "let's split the middle of Youtube and Netflix for more short-form stuff" that nobody has shown they wanted, now or then. Just with shit-tons more money to throw at celebrities vs more youtube-creator stuff.
Kinda. It's USA/Japan only, so from the other side, it basically looks like "The American version of Crave", rather than Netflix, which a global behemoth.
So trying to do it first isn't necessarily insane - try to beat the organic disruption there, so they can capture the result.
I'm just not convinced the market for "short [currently free] shit to watch while killing time on my phone" is ever really going to grow into a TV-and-movie-killing Netflix/Hollywood replacement, as compared to a smaller more casual market with smaller returns.
You could possibly pull off more premium ad rates, though... but you could really only do this from inside Google.
[1] https://watchnebula.com/ [2] https://www.floatplane.com/
They were wrong. People want high quality, professional content.
The problems with Quibi had nothing to do with the developers, designers, or product managers. The only real app specific problems, such as forcing it to be mobile only, likely came directly from the executive team. The undertaking was flawed from the start and lots of people in the entertainment industry believed it was a monumental waste of cash well before the service launched and anyone had a look at the actual tech.
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
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.
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.
So you cant really change that much week to week.
Some folks on Patreon are experimenting with it. One of my favorite series Astartes[0] puts out episodes every rare once and awhile, but we all clamor for them nonetheless.
You couldn't run a normal show this way, for sure. But it is interesting to see the results of it in the small.
Consider also the way standups hone material over many performances building up their set.
So there are incremental feedback models in entertainment - but they’re rare.
I guess remakes and reboots are a crude model of iteration as well, although it’s not like each new iteration of Spider-Man is a refinement of the last based on audience feedback - it’s still speculative ‘here’s that same thing repackaged in a way new audiences will love!’ thinking, rather than creeping towards product-market-fit
This situation is emblematic of the fundamental conflict it would face. On the one side the desire to produce rapid cheap bite-size content to iterate on for a metrics-based tech company, on the other blowing all the cash for said content on the Hollywood tactic of putting star power on the red carpet
This condition needs a name. I've done it myself too many times to count. The first time was back in 2004 with a Facebook rival at Yale University. We had all this great social photo and media sharing but it wasn't growing against the simplicity of Facebook. So, after a couple months of not being Facebook, we gave up and got jobs
<face palm>
You can't easily change the design of the space shuttle after you built it, so you better get it right.
Consumer hardware isn't quite so permanent, you can always recall the whole thing (samsung phones, early famicom), if you have the money.
But a website is easy to change -- there's no sense making it perfect before you know if people will use it.
But this sentiment is exactly this issue! "Before you know if people will use it" -- the point is that when people don't use it, is it because it was a bad idea to compete with Facebook or because the design wasn't right? When to give up and when to iterate?
- "I'm a rich/powerful/successful media person. I had success in my industry doing business a certain way, so why shouldn't I be able to translate that into running a tech startup too?"
- "I'm a good programmer and I don't see any reason why Zuckerberg would be smarter than me. What's so special about Facebook? We can beat them."
- "I'm in touch with what most people want, and this product idea totally makes sense to me. All I need to do is polish it up, and I'm sure I'll find users who are as excited about it as I am."
Or, the flip side of the same coin is really about ego. One of the hardest lessons of the lean/agile/tech-y start-up culture (in its idealized form), is to not let ego interfere with learning, but also to be able to let go of ego-centrism without giving up confidence or competence (i.e. you don't have all the answers and you should be fundamentally humble and curious, BUT you should not forget or overlook your existing skills or competencies either).
There wasn't a ton of market research, iteration or testing, at least not up front. Executives would green-light a project and budget based on their personal experience and/or biases and opinions about what will work and what won't..
Not sure if that's still the case (this was ~10 year ago), but that rarely works in tech.
While there‘s a limited subset of AI like GANs that I‘d actually call creative, the usual tabular models are none of these.
So what do you do to maximise chances for a box office success?
Do a sequel to (or remake of) a well known movie, hire a star, use the standard playbook (never skip the „all is lost“ moment for dramatic effect) and add a love scene.
If you ever wondered why 2020 Hollywood feels like the same boring stuff in 8k UHD over and over again.
I think Netflix did pretty well with just hiring some known creative people and telling them „whatever you do, just use your gut feeling and we‘ll buy it“.
But I get your point, either extreme can potentially produce less than great results.
That's been going on since the first wagons rolled into Hollywood.
I'm pretty sure even Shakespeare was doing a 16th Century, theatrical equivalent.
That's your toolkit. Build from there. And that' been true since we're telling stories, more or less.
Those Netflix decisions about who to hire are extremely data-driven - much moreso than Hollywood. House of Cards was their proof of concept in 2013:
> Sarandos says their wealth of data on user viewing habits proved there's a large audience for Fincher, Spacey and political thrillers.
https://web.archive.org/web/20130126061225/http://www.huffin...
Really initial production is only half your production costs, and is a tricky process where what's greenlit often doesn't bear much relation to what comes out the other end. So the market research and metrics work better when you know a bit more about what the final product is.
- Movies begin as risk assessments and cash flow analysis in the finance dept based on historical data.
- The revenue graph for a movie is a function of release month, the number of celebrity actors in the film, the box office receipts, followed by DVD sales, followed by TV release and a long tail of syndication (airlines, cable etc).
- Studios know, for example, that a romantic comedy in Feb staring Jennifer Aniston and Adam Sandler will make a guaranteed $35 million at the box office regardless of what the movie is. A summer blockbuster with Will Smith will have a guaranteed $100 million in box office and DVD sales spread out over time. Sequels to popular movies will bring in a certain minimum income guaranteed. Movies that minimize dialog and maximize action do well in the global market. Include China or a Chinese celebrity actor in the plotline and you are guaranteed millions of additional revenue. This provides the bean counters information on how much to spend on movie production to minimize risk and ensure a steady revenue stream throughout the year.
- So the finance dept will green light a February rom-com with a production budget of $10 million, a summer blockbuster where there can splurge $75-100 million on production etc. They monitor other studio release dates to avoid going head-to-head with their releases. They keep a stable of celebrity actors on studio contract and force directors to include plot lines that maximize a global audience.
- It is only after the finance dept gives the green light and budget that they go and look at possible movies to make and pick a director. Story ? - that's just about the last thing to work out (Pixar is the exception).
If the investors are known for hockey stick growth tech startups, your company is a tech company even if you are just long real estate.
most ventures fail, whether it's in tech or entertainment. tech has billion dollar flameouts too--webvan, theranos, etc. entertainment has startups that hit big too--parasite for example. founders who exit successfully can more easily raise the next time around, just like directors and producers who have a hit.
each industry thinks it's unique and different, but that's due mainly to ego, not to (many) true differences. even cultures largely overlap. people with gobs of money can (and if warranted, should) fail too.
for instance, the movie (and tv) business more readily lends itself to a repetitive process constrained on storytelling, which is more focused, on a macro scale, than tech. it would be akin to tech companies settling on only building web businesses over and over again, albeit with different twists. the video game sector has possibly hit that kind of stride.
i don't know that this affects their ability to succeed though, well-funded or not.
Streaming video for example has more or less stopped producing viable venture startups on the B2C side. Successful new ventures in streaming, the ones who will actually make money, are folks like Disney and Warner with IP. Their business advantage is horizontal integration, rent seeking for content with killer margins over company-controlled pipes. Disney Plus, HBO Max apps have zero notable tech innovations. The only criteria to the consumer is that the content is exclusive and the app stays in the background and doesn't fail. OTT video, as a vertical for consumer innovation, is over.
Same goes for SaaS, ecommerce, social networks, gaming, music, news etc. Maybe we'll get some standout disruptions from time to time as hardware evolves. But the tech is all about plumbing from here on out..
This is interesting.
It's probably hard to distinguish companies w/ entirely different culture and talent from the outside, it might be easy to lump any new company into the same category of "disruptive" or something.
If you had to draw this distinction - which signs would you look for?
There's no downside for a CEO who invests in a failed new venture like Quibi. Very easy to explain away. All his peers did the same, it was an investment in the future, attempt to diversify, outside the box thinking, etc. There is MAJOR downside for NOT investing in a new idea that takes off like a rocket ship, that CEO will look like a fool and "the world passed him by" to investors, peers, employees, talent, etc.
Think in terms of "reputation expected value" of the various CEOs and the multitude of major investors makes total sense.
...a Quibi subscription is $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without...
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.
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.
https://help.quibi.com/hc/en-us/articles/360042455452-Can-I-...
The only on mobile thing may have been necessary for the business model.
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?
Whereas success means "exceeded expectations."
Even if an objective measure (revenue, users etc...) is higher for the "failure" than the "success."
I know the sharing feature would have been so much better I assumed they would add this soon. If I watch something and have no-one to share it with in my social circle it loses its buzz appeal. Like the most un-entertaining crap (90day finance) is interesting because the people I know also watch it. It becomes a topic. Telling someone about a show they can't access or see even a clip of it online to find out if they are interested in paying $$$ for it seems like a failed business plan in our internet based world.
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.
You at least heard of it, and used it.
Edit: i'm not aware of any marketing in EU, and also i needed to get through some hops to get the app
Not great timing to get eyes on your ads. Not the right mood for “here’s light and quick content for your commute!”
Sort of. Netflixe has huge ongoing multi-year investment in their own content. That library has value. Quibi content reverts to the creator after a period of time, effectively leaving Quibi with nothing for its investment.
And I have no clue how they started, both watch on their phones, but both of them are so clueless about technology I honestly can't understand how they got into the youtube app in the first place. But they did and now they pretty much prefer youtube to regular tv (uk),
If youtube can entertain them then god help everyone else, cable networks, BBC, Netflix, everyone should be terrified of youtube.
Basically climbing up tree's in urban areas, rigging them with rope and then either pruning branches or completely dismantling them. It's really a UK only name for the job I'm not sure it's used anywhere else.
Which demonstrates their failure to understand why YouTube is so successful in this space. YouTube is all about making millions of videos that satisfy the niche interests of billions of individuals, while Hollywood is about making hundreds of things to satisfy the broad interest of billions.
They would have been better served by building up a pipeline for identifying and cultivating new talent. Six million dollars would probably pay for a lot of content created by some attractive college-aged nobodies with a little bit of training. And at least some of that is bound to be a hit.
Instead I watch interesting mini-documentaries, how-to's etc on YouTube, learning about history, food, electronics etc.
However YouTube is annoying, the ads are worse than regular TV now. I'm actually surprised Netflix hasn't branched off into this space. They could have done a Spotify-like thing but for videos.
They have all the infra for serving the content, they just need content creators. Sure it would be in competition with their more traditional video content, but as it stands YouTube gets those views anyway...
So that's certainly something. Still puzzles me why Netflix isn't trying to get a piece of this pie.
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.
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?
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.
(To be honest this is just one of the pile of problems of the product/service)
Who is going to watch video on a phone at home? Oh, wait, kids, kids love their tablet and phone video. Which they get for free. From YouTube. Or their parents already pay for Netflix. Or Disney+.
Really, who exactly is this product for? It absolutely feels like Boomers trying to be where the kids are, but the kids are already well served by video game streamers.
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.
You find out by trying.
The thing is not to use $1bn to try.
And there's no cheap way to produce content really in particular if you want to compete with the production value of modern TV shows.
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.
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.
This is just another overly hyped "business" that wasn't meant to pan out.
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.
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.
> 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.
I actually wish the cuts differed more by showing angles from totally different cameras or being colored differently. It would be expensive but seriously groundbreaking. One day.
The fictional series, however, are shot with an almost 1:1 ratio since the safe-zone is ridiculously small.
My impression every time I heard about it was people weren't even buying into the "other people were excited" part.
Classic silicon valley-style hubris.
Which still turned out to be a water pistol to Apple, Amazon, Disney and Netflix’s carrier strike groups.
Actually, rich human hubris. It's not unique to any single location.
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.
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.
Step 1: "I read in the Wall Street Journal that young people's attention spans are shorter these days, and that PewDiePie and Jake Paul make bank on Youtube with 10 minute videos."
Step 2: "I feel my entertainment company was late to the party with things like YouTube, Netflix and TikTok. It would have been better if we'd got in at the ground floor."
Step 3: "I'm told even if those youtube videos look spontaneous, they have scripts and production teams behind them."
Step 4: "So Quibi is like that, but with celebrities? And other entertainment CEOs have already signed up to invest? Then count me in!"
- 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.
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.
> 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.
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
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.
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.
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).
It tries to be tiktok and netflix at the same time, without being good at either vertical.
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.
-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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They flooded their target market (which I'm obviously outside of) with hundreds of low effort ads which probably turned people off it.
And it seems like they did next to nothing to build their brand outside of that targeted advertising.
https://andrewchen.co/after-the-techcrunch-bump-life-in-the-...
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.
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.
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.
Money != product even if you have nearly $2B dollars.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Top 10 ICOs all failures with no users despite $100m+ each.
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.
Who?
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.investigationdiscovery.com/
One of my favorite channels, BTW :-)
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.
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...