Quibi Is Shutting Down
wsj.com
wsj.com
I actually wanted to give my money to Quibi, but they made it too hard to do so. I really wanted to see the new Reno 911 skits, and I didn't find them anywhere besides Quibi. I was ready to pay and I tried to find an option to watch Quibi content on my desktop, but it seemed like there wasn't any. Only mobile. Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.
Meg Whitman has had a legendary career, but even she doesn't appear to have experience founding a tech company. She started at P&G and then went to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4M in revenue[0]. And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience.
I would love to read an insiders account of what happened between the company's formation in August 2018 to April 2020, when the product launched. It looks like they got tons of media deals lined up before the app launched, I wonder how much product development and discovery they were doing during that time.
Quibi was a disaster and Whitman was probably the wrong person to lead it — and Katzenberg the wrong person to lead the creative — but to suggest Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t have real founder experience is just wrong. He was a founder of what was then known as DreamWorks SKG (he’s the K) and its DreamWorks Animation division. DreamWorks was the most audacious studio since United Artists, and although DreamWorks Pictures ultimately failed, DreamWorks Animation lives on even now. But regardless, to say that he doesn’t have founded experience is flat wrong. He co-founded one of the most high-profile media companies of the last thirty years.
Quibi was a disaster and we can all have a good laugh at how much it missed the mark but Katzenberg is a founder — and I would argue a damn good one — and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history.
she drove HP into the ground, to the point wear Bloomberg named her the most underachieving ceo
at ebay she purchased skype for 4 billion then turned around and sold it for 2.
Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives.
If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.
Meg Whitman was lucky enough to ride the eBay rocket at the right moment. Everything she touched after that, went wrong.
So flying directly in the face of that and assuming you could carve out a niche based on a "time of day"/"behavior" thing alone seems very daring, especially when you're still spending an unimaginable amount of $$ on content that you'll need to pay back soon.
The swing and a miss on the consumption model crippled the ability of the content to stand on its own and give them any other chance...
There's a huge difference between "we [originally] wanted to target market segment X" vs "we will turn down easy money from market segment Y", and Quibi was doing the latter, which is not defensible. That's especially bad when X vanishes and Y increases. (Here, X = people watching on phones, Y = people watching at home.)
To be "not interested" in Y is to be not interested in money.
Now, to pre-empt an obvious reply: yes, sometimes you do want to turn down easy money from a segment Y. But that's primarily when you're promoting a niche luxury product, where usage by Y will hurt your branding long-term. It's not applicable to a product that deliberately attempts (and needs) to be mass-market, especially when it's targeting transit users and people who have to idly wait.
I actually wanted to watch the Reno 911 stuff and the Ron Funches show.... on my TV, where I watch stuff.
They played stupid games and didn't win any prizes.
Sorry that seems to be the most pointless niche I think someone tried to focus on
Let's be honest, "being at home" is not the reason it failed.
Why not? Esp. when everybody's at home!? This sounds ridiculous.
Do you realise people used to consume a lot of media on their phones vertically... but now they don't... for obvious reaons.
That can't be that hard to understand? Market changed. Previously valid opportunity vanished. They didn't do anything wrong but be around at the wrong time.
This argument would have to ignore the massive success of TikTok during the pandemic.
Saying that the pandemic has stopped people using their phones for this purpose is excuse-making bullshit.
They failed because their content was terrible, they just aren't admitting it.
I signed up to watch it. It just wasn't the same as the good old show I used to watch, so I unsubscribed.
I flipped through page after page after page of their other content offerings and not a single other thing looked remotely interesting to me. I tried watching a couple just because, and I got bored fast.
If paid subscriptions failed to fill the ads hole, the yes, the pandemic would be bad for business.
That's on top of competing against Google, Facebook, and established broadcast/cable advertising markets, with likely unestablished or unattractive demographics.
I had a similar experience recently when my phone broke and many services wouldn't work on my older phone, or older iPad, even in the browser. The worst offender was HBO Max which also flat out refuses to run on linux. I had to cancel it because I'm not going to buy a streaming service to exclusively use on my work laptop.
Does anyone remember when we made websites with the goal of as many people using them as possible? streaming video has been mainstream for over a decade, yet everyone still fucks it up.
In a pandemic, I think people would prefer longer form of content.
Apple?
Well, Netflix did that for a long time, too. Last time I tried to watch Netflix on Linux it was still impossible (supposedly you can do it now, but I haven't tried in a few years). Restricting modes of access isn't necessarily a death knell.
Quibi’s decision really does not make sense. It is reasonably cheap to release a viewer app or website for the mainstream browsers & OSes, and indeed if there is a good Quibi show then offering it on desktops & TVs would significantly improve the viewing experience and bring more people in.
The difference is the market share for Linux. It wasn’t that important. Restricting a paid video service, especially where the content are professionally produced, to mobile devices, and where you can’t use the excuse that it’s a social media platform, sounds like suicide.
Criterion Channel doesn't work on linux though, which I realized only after buying their product and watching a few movies on my Mac. Had I known it I would never have bought since I spend 90% of my time on linux.
I realize that a company CEO doesn't need to be a subject matter expert, but when you're building a platform focused on millennials (mobile-first), it would help to have someone that can identify with the target audience.
edit: And co-founder Katzenberg has his "emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by assistant" [2]
[1] https://theweek.com/speedreads/923863/quibi-ceo-admits-not-r...
[2] https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm...
They thought millennials wanted "shorter" based on the success of tiktok/instagram/etc. But their content was too long to be short. And the "golden age of TV" we are in basically proves that people don't really want shorter in scripted content. If anything, we want deeper stories. Novellas have never outsold novels. Movies were an outlier for a while, based on the fact it was so hard to produce content, but even movies are now becoming trilogy's+. Youtube is hugely successful because it satisfies niche content, the length is irrelevant.
They thought it should be "mobile", but by limiting it to mobile they meant that you could only watch part of the time. Netflix is perfectly fine on mobile.
The switching back and forth thing feels like a novelty like 1 time then you just do whatever you want and stick with that. Its also hard for creators as you don't know how people will use it, so you have to make it "worse in landscape" and "worse in portrait" so people can watch on either method.
I absolutely LOVE people taking big risks on ideas. This was just a bad idea from the start. I wish they would have blown $1.8B on some shoot the moon healthcare idea or something.
A more interesting, much smaller risk would've been something like a sketch comedy show where every clip is under a minute (Tiktok style). Yeah a ton of amateurs are already doing stuff like that, but - hire them!
Totally right, imo. I might be old and out of touch, but to me 10 minutes is way too long for content on mobile, and short enough to be kind of annoying on anything else. I'd rather watch a 25 or 30 minute show if I want something short on TV.
'How do you do fellow kids?'
Whitman was the 'Business Person'.
That said, the content format is really quite different, and it's hard to predict how '5 minute bits' would work, and they spent possibly way too much money on it, it would have been better to 'start small', to find the format that works, and then spend a fortune - which is probably something that Meg should have understood given her background in the Valley.
Interesting.
She's not so good at taking something that is new or failing and making it good. She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined. She ran HPE into the ground because it was already failing.
She didn't succeed with Quibi because she doesn't know about how to find market fit.
"Yeah, but she has experience"
I think the thing that confuses people is that the true domain for some companies isn't what the end consumer sees. I worked for a car website for a while, and very few of the executives were really car people. But they were all incredible experts on how dealerships worked, and that was actually what our business was, not how cars work.
But for an up and coming company, everybody in the top ranks should be involved and knowledgable of subject at hand
What does this even mean?
Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough.
Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...
Who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll all be like "Quibi was really ahead of it's time"
I would be surprised if anyone does. The reason why Quibi was able to get so many creators onboard is twofold. The first reason is they had a lot of money to spend. The second reason is that the deals they signed were very friendly to creators. Quibi got two years of exclusivity with the content, but they didn't own it outright. The creators could reedit the shows into more traditional formats and resell it after two years or even just give it away for free on Youtube and make whatever they can in ad revenue. So while the content will likely resurface eventually, I can't imagine many big players will want to pick up Quibi's side of those original deals.
People do want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don't want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it's way better than the free alternative.
Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.
From what I've observed, this only happens in two cases:
* Where there was a fan base that loved the product but it just didn't work out.
* Where there was legitimate innovation behind the offering that can't be fully realized.
I don't think Quibi hits either of these points. There might be other signals I haven't thought through, but these are the 2 main ones I've been able to piece together for when people attribute a company being "ahead of its time".
People just care much more about content than the experience unless it’s really really terrible and even then in the case of shows and movies content comes first.
15 min episodes with lackluster content that are essentially only good for your short commute run isn’t and likely never will be what people are looking for.
I honestly didn’t even knew Quibi existed until this year or maybe late 2019 when they had a huge marketing push for their exclusive shows and those shows sucked. You got a disjointed experience akin to a hallmark movie split into short episodes.
We already tried that with “webisodes” in the past and they didn’t survive once streaming became a thing because they couldn’t match the quality of the content of Netflix and co.
Quibi failed because people don’t mind pausing and the few that do probably would rather watch a 20-30min episode of their favorite sitcoms during commute than 1 or 2 episodes of some Quibi show.
The format especially the portrait mode content was also annoying as fuck, this isn’t instagram.
Uhh..so? It didn't even launch until April 2020.
You didn't know of it earlier because it was founded in 2018 with a product launch in 2020.
Quibi shutting down is met with a resounding lol from every demographic on the planet the end
It's easy to look back and say that. I wouldn't have guessed people cared about temporary video messages, but look at Snap.
Quibi gave you portrait TV shows with low production value with actors trying to cash in on the remainder of their GoT fame.
Nobody's paying for Snap either. The only reason they are (somewhat) alive is because advertisers still think burning money on annoying people is worth it based on inflated or misleading metrics. Once the adtech bubble pops they'll be down the toilet as well.
The amount they raised is reasonable if the goal is to create a few flagship shows and dozens of less-expensive ones. They went for A+ film/TV talent and actually managed to close deals with some of them.
I'm somewhat baffled by the "if we just raise a bunch more money to produce way more expensive content it'll work this time" logic, but if you're a Hollywood person I think it's probably easy to believe that more grassroots/independent youtube-creator productions wouldn't be able to compete with your A-Listers.
1) Their hypothesis that short form content was desirable was deeply flawed, and I think based on an assumption that online attention spans are short. This is not true with film and TV where the trend has gone over to binge watching very long form content e.g. Vikings, House of Cards, etc.
2) There was no way to watch their content on a big screen. So that introduced another assumption - that no large market segment would want to consume their content on a bigger screen. We actually tried to watch it on Amazon Fire and the hack is horrible.
3) They decided they wanted to attract a number of A list directors and other talent and blew not only a lot of budget on that, but they also wrote their terms so that after two years they lose exclusivity and after 7 years the content reverts back to the creator. This is insane, if you consider the investment and long term value around the films and series that Prime, Netflix and Disney create. The direct effect of this was that there was no business to sell when they decided to shop the company.
4) Quibi suspended releasing new content during the recent protests, while continuing to burn investment cash. They should have adapted to the times. Even post 9/11 certain films were put on hold, but those were films insensitive to current events. I can't imagine all their content fell into that category.
They still have $850 million in cash and have decided to call it. Sounds like Whitman and Katzenberg actually have a good shot at recouping some of their $10.5 and $5.5MM investment respectively. Which leads me to wonder whether they had that money to burn in the first place. Doesn't exactly feel like a "failure isn't an option" approach - and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot. Although the business model may be so fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I've described above, that a pivot isn't even feasible.
All things being equal, I wonder what the content is really worth, that stuff typically doesn't age well so not maintaining the ownership may not have been a bad thing and it sounds like they recognized that it wasn't going to catch fire and so shutting it down makes sense. I expect the investment community will look upon it favorably. It's easy to criticize and I don't think I'd have ever paid $10 a month for it, but we also live in a world where there is TV streaming to gas pumps. I wonder what people will do when gas stations stop selling gas but it still takes 20minutes to fully charge your electric car...
It's a combination of respect to investors, the drain of working on something that isn't going anywhere, and starting a fresh company (and cap table) if you have something you want to do instead.
Yes, the startup that became Twitter.
Honestly, thank god they didn't. Sure, I think pivots sometimes make sense, but I think they realized at this point that all the money they put in was sunk cost, and they're really nowhere closer to when they started, and in fact it's probably easier to start anew if they even wanted to with a lower cost base. Better to call it quits and save their dough.
I wonder why they didn’t just try to monetize what they have, while they have it, on YouTube. That would at least tell you if the content was better than the platform.
But, it sounds like they gave creators extraordinary control.
A starting investment of that size probably qualifies it for a record in the fat (as distinct from lean) startup size category as well.
Katzenberg comes from an industry (film studios) for which that is largely the model. They are willing to have some expensive failures ($100MM-scale) if the successes will launch a "franchise" which is subsequently mined.
A failure more than an order of magnitude off what's tolerable in his old industry may be hard to survive, who knows. But industrial filmmaking is a lot like industrial food production: a blend of fear (customers won't adopt the new) and dictating the product to the customer.
It could work if your product met or was at least close to the minimum quality standard of your competitors. From what I've seen and read, Quibi was horribly substandard.
or alternatively twenty thousand 100k research grants in the sciences. Would be pretty great if we could produce some knowledge instead of more mediocre TV shows.
> "Among the backers were most of the major Hollywood studios, Google, Alibaba and the Madrone Capital Partners."
I wonder how much of that $2B was eaten up with "Hollywood Accounting"
Trust me -- this was a bonanza for them. There's never been a greater demand for content than the past couple years, with platforms exploding.
No need to worry about actors or crew being exploited. Happily, the union makes sure of that! (E.g. in contrast to the tech world.)
2 billion is chump change for the market they're in. Netflix is spending 15 billion a year on content, Amazon and Apple like 6 billion a piece, and Hulu is around 3.
Cash burn is similar. Netflix is 10s of billions in the hole since they were founded and continues to burn a few billon a year.
With that kind of funding, and given who the founders are, maybe “startup” shouldn’t be used at all? The linked article didn’t use that term, and I mean, a startup that becomes worth $1B is called a “unicorn”, and this venture was launched with more funding than that.
- Initially restricting allowed devices to mobile only.
- Flagrant nepotism, like Reese Witherspoon being given $6 million to narrate a documentary miniseries...with her husband coincidentally being the Head of Talent Acquisition at Quibi.
- Seemingly not having a single critically-acclaimed show. Quibi's strategy was seemingly to just dump money on A-list actors, not A-list writers and it made all of the shows (or at least the dozen I sampled) a wasted effort.
- (Allegedly) stealing the video-rotation technology from another company, and being mired in a lawsuit about it.
Also the idea of dropping one episode every week. Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week. That's twice as short as any TV show out there, not to mention Netflix releasing entire seasons at once.
Also preventing users from taking screenshots, which is just stupid. It just helps if people share your content to other people.
Wow, had no idea about this. Despicable conduct.
> Also preventing users from taking screenshots
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this point too. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.
Really, when all these missteps are stacked up, how was anyone thinking that this company wouldn't fail? I know hind sight is 20/20, but these all should have been immediate red flags.
I agree with all your points except this one. Rick and Morty is essentially 20 minute episodes released weekly, after commercials. If you took out long pauses, transitions, and other filling, I'm sure you could get it down to 15 minutes of punch. I'd add a lot of video creators like game of zones, alt-shift-x, theinternethistorian, also fill the punch of 15-25 minute content released weekly/monthly, are ravenously popular.
There is room for ~10-20 minute content but it may be harder to market/monetize.
"Actually, Quibi doesn’t own any of the big-budget premium content for which it has shelled out upwards of $100,000 per minute. The company has seven-year licenses on its short-form series; after two years, content owners have the right to assemble the shows and distribute them elsewhere."
If they don't own the content what they hell did they spend 1.7 billion dollars on?!
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/quibi-considers-shutti...
I've never liked any management work Whitman has done, and Katzenberg's primary skill is raising money. How could this have possibly gone right?
I wonder how they made out on it all. they had reasonably good track record prior and likely had a reasonably good cash component, but any equity they had must be wiped.
I feel bad saying this, but I thank Quibi for my lovingly renovated house. No backsies!
Sidenote: There are so many important OSS projects that basically get little to no funding while things like Quibi burn millions if not billions in the dumbest way possible.
Citation needed. Every portfolio I've looked at outside of the top firms has had multiple investments (approved by partners) that to my mind look mind bogglingly dumb. Not Theranos level of dumb, where they'd have to have a little knowledge of blood based diagnostics and the statistical significance of results from finger pricks to know its a fraud, but "we didn't do due diligence and found out that this is a perpetual motion machine/founder doesn't own critical IP/financials don't make sense in any universe" levels of dumb. The former slip through the cracks at even the best firms, but the latter is like watching a slow motion train wreck.
With the benefit of hindsight, the entire industry looks like thousands of monkeys with typewriters (especially when biotech gets frothy).
It seems seems like some combination of Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat stories, and TikTok that you could throw on a pitch deck and promise investors will be the next version of TV for millennials.
Starting with 100% original programming makes no sense to me. You have 2 billion dollars, license some mega hits to at least bring people in. I downloaded the app and saw exactly what I was expecting - “Create account” or “Sign in”, no way to play anything or see any previews. People aren’t going to try so hard to seek out these shows they haven’t seen or heard of before.
Then, with the success of Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram pitching a premium short videos app does not sound crazy especially, again, when it's Katzenberg pitching it to you (and he must have invested a good chunk of his own cash).
Then he managed to hire Meg Whitman as CEO and first employee. So now it's Whitman and Katzenberg pitching that idea to you.
Celebs often let their success go to their head thinking they're the reason why movies they have been in were successful. But the real reason a movie is successful has more to do with directing, writing, editing and all of the background work that was put into it.
Why subscribe to Quibi to see Celebs embarrass themselves with cringe content, when you can see them do that on instagram for free!
One thing I do have to commend Quibi for, however, is how well they reversioned their video content. I think they will be seen as a little ahead of the competition there (possibly before their time). Against other content houses that will have significantly more footage to get through (and/or less resources for this task).
I think the different versions (e.g. portrait/landscape for Quibi) will be a little way off being that common. I expect computer vision tooling will enable it more broadly when it can at least expedite the process considerably (which probably isn't a huge distance off although then the blocker is organisational processes around publishing video).
In the former case it's mostly social media, the main value here is memes and/or following creators/influencers; there is never a storyline or a "show" to follow per-se.
Quibi's business model would be that people would not only be interested in a storyline contained within bite-sized chunks of video but that they would actually pay for it. This is a flawed idea; when it comes to a story people want it to go as long as possible (and the pause button is a thing that exists already), there's no reason to want artificially-constrained storylines when you can get the longform equivalent on Netflix for the same price.
It seems there are 3 different types of videos with decreasing segment (or episode) lengths: movies, tv shows, bite-sized shows. Each has its own place for user needs. I think sometimes people don't want to (or don't have time) watch a full movie, so they opt for a tv episode. Similarly, sometimes they don't want to watch a full tv episode.
The portrait / landscape mode should be gamified.
I never really got how it was ever supposed to work. Bootstrapping an entire library to compete against Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, et al? Even with 2 billion dollars of funding that's a tall order.
10 minute shows was an interesting gimmick, but it's not that different than a syndicated half hour. It might even be worse—Too long to have the instant gratification of Tiktok and too short to flesh out a good single-episode story arc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90
No? You don’t? Not a surprise. And nobody will remember Quibi either.
"By playing credits between each act, instead of commercials, Quibi claimed a 10 episode season was actually 40 “low budget under 12 minute episodes”, allowing them to skirt SAG (actors union) and WGA (writers union) minimums. They were a scab-based business model."
https://twitter.com/LukeXCunningham/status/13189766621391462...
Yes, that was their target- but were they really only targeting NYC and a handful of other cities commuters? That's a pretty small TAM. Everyone else in a car and not watching content on their phone.
The content was not compelling, and that's the real story. They overpaid to quickly produce a library with star power and the end results were sub par, and could not compete with free alternatives, or depending on how you look at it- could not force their way into the budgets for consumer's paid streaming services.
For Quibi, it seems the fundamental issue may have been lack of product market fit due to a) not testing, and b) having a shallow understanding of the entertainment market.
You couldn’t take screenshots to share.
What genius thought that would be a good idea?
* I do find it odd and not a good idea for those entities to disallow screenshots, but it certainly is the norm in that world.
In some ways it reminds me of Vine, Periscope, Musically and the other apps that preceded TikTok. Also reminds me of the quick demise of Mixer.
Maybe it is the case of the right idea but at the wrong time. I can only guess the expenses were too high and they have no option to but to fold.
At a certain point those ad bills add up, especially if they aren't able to convert enough free trial people into paid users.
Every single article I read about Quibi before today was about how bad their series are. And while I haven't seen a single show myself, the worst offenders do seem like the type of trash that made people run away from regular TV to begin with. Chrissy's Court, Gayme show, Murder House Flip...
I imagine you can make a bad idea work with good content, and you can make bad content work with a good, convenient platform. But I suppose there is not much you can do when the entire internet is complaining about both of them.
Both Netflix and Hulu have experimented with short form "mobile-optimized" viewing. Short things to watch on your commute or between meetings. Neither had much success with the format.
I don't sit down to watch shows for 30 minutes. Sometimes I'll binge for 2 hours and get 4 different rising-action-falling-action cycles and 4 different cliffhangers trying to keep me on for the next episode, which I was planning on doing anyways.
Sometimes I'll watch for 45 minutes, get halfway through a second episode but have to shut it off for one reason or another, and when I come back the next day I feel disoriented because the plot cycle is built to assume an uninterrupted segment.
I don't think the solution here is 10 minute episodes per se, but I think the flow of storytelling in modern TV series is waiting for some innovation to bring it to the 21st century.
A great example of innovation in storytelling is the Witcher 3. Everytime I boot the game up, during the loading sequence I get a 15 second voiced over "recap" where Geralt informs me about where the main storyline is and what we need to do next, whereas in traditional TV segments I'm given a recap every 30 minutes of progress regardless of where in the show I start and stop watching.
I wonder how many times in talking about the app have people needed to spell it out or say it's pronounced like "kwibee" not "keebee", etc. I actually needed to go to wikipedia.org to see the exact pronunciation.
So much about the branding reminds me of the "Cuil" search engine failure a decade ago. I remember seeing the original name "Cuill" in some of my request logs and thinking at the time that it was some malicious DDOS bot that wanted to see my site as "see you ill". First time that I saw in the news about "Quibi" I immediately thought of the whole "Cuil" search engine failure. Not a great first impression, but that it was.
Anyway, you could say we now all know how it's pronounced. As of today "Quibi" is pronounced dead.
Sounds like top shelf content, let's try a review:
"My most recent pick was Dummy, a show where Anna Kendrick becomes friends with her boyfriend’s sex doll. When I turned my phone horizontally, suddenly I could see a widescreen version of the same series: The sex doll’s legs splayed further along the floor, and in the background I could now see Donal Logue, the actor who plays the boyfriend. ... The episode of Dummy lasted six minutes, just long enough for me to think, What is this?, when I realized that the boyfriend was a barely fictionalized version of Emmy-winning TV writer Dan Harmon. Then it ended."
-- https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-bites-are-quick-and-bad....
Okay, bad roulette spin. Here's another view:
"“Dummy” is a semi-autobiographical comedy from Cody Heller, whom Kendrick plays, with Donal Logue portraying her real-life partner Dan Harmon, the Emmy-winning showrunner of “Community” and “Rick & Morty.” The 10-episode series sees Cody imagining that her boyfriend’s sex doll is sentient and high jinks ensue. It is breezy viewing at an average of seven minutes apiece, but the show deserves Emmy recognition for how its frames are so deliberately composed in service of advancing the art form. Relatively few shows contend for Best Short Form Comedy/Drama Series; that the category exists is a testament to the academy’s continual acknowledgement of the evolution of television, which “Dummy” embodies."
-- https://www.goldderby.com/article/2020/anna-kendrick-dummy-q...
I've got to imagine there's a bunch of investors out there who were pretty disappointed in what got launched
Second, they didn’t create short episodes for quick watching, they created full length movies and just carved them up, again this was obvious from their own marketing stuff.
Argument 1: No one wants short-form video. YouTube has been the master at this market, TikTok too! I think there is plenty of space for more short-form content.
Argument 2: No one wants to pay for streaming content. Netflix and Hulu have plenty of varying length content that people willingly pay for.
Ultimately, Quibi itself was weird. Correct me if I'm wrong, but their marketing strategy was, high end short form content, code for Hollywooy-esque content. There's nothing wrong with this style of content, but when I watch something short-form, I expect it to keep my attention when I'm actively holding my phone.
YouTube and TikTok content are both edited to be high paced and leave little room for air. That keeps it engaging when you're on your phone because you just can't look away. If I wanted to relax after a long day, I want to sit on the couch and turn on the TV. That's where typical Hollywood content fits in. Lots of space in between spoken dialog, music, and more reflective pacing.
Quibi tried to give you TV pacing, but short-form format and ultimately that was rejected in the market.
Why on earth didn't they test this thesis before blowing through a billion dollars?
I think we're looking at the test... Something something desperate venture capital.
Quibi may have fared better if they likewise focused on a specific niche of viewers.
My only gripe is that it’s about low quality entertainment. I prefer we take these big risks with projects that might have truly consequential and positive impact: preventative health, air quality in cities like Santiago and Salt Lake City, ecological restoration near dense urban areas, better understanding of complex social dynamics, waste management, screenless recreation.
Well, the thing is they didn't. Short-form content isn't exactly a new concept; I've been watching short videos for years on Youtube and other sites. And the way that Big Hollywood executives chose to approach making this short-form content appears to have largely been "make a regular long-form content and chop it up into smaller pieces" which is a high risk move only in the way of the "That's a bold move Cotton" meme.
"Quibi - the TikTok of Netflix."
Now that's a golden ticket idea.
That's a lot of money up in smoke.
Reading the comments I can see it was mobile-only and short episodes targeted at people riding public transport (or similar short duration where what you can do is very limited and you want to entertain yourself).
Seems like a big failure marketing-wise.
Why should I care about Disney+? It has tons of Disney content.
Why should I care about Shudder? It has tons of horror content.
Why should I care about Quibi?
At what point does a VC that randomly bets on prospects beat the average?
Her track record is attrocious. I say this as someone still reeling from the death of Palm.
I don't think anyone is talking about breaking up YouTube itself, unless I missed something. It would be one of the pieces Google would be broken into.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24852504
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24850702
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849147
My point is how inconsistent all this is -- on one hand, there is discussion about how YouTube should be broken up because there are not sufficient players. On the other hand a huge contender just shut down because there wasnt sufficient interest in yet another streaming platform.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21527197/quibi-streaming...
They credit the WSJ (which may or may not be paywalled depending on referrer?): https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-p...
eBay was the world's biggest online marketplace while Amazon was still selling books. eBay could've been Amazon, and perhaps would have been, given a leader with the right vision.
Her tenure at HP was disastrous. And now the Quibi debacle. Can someone please clue me in? I don't know as much as I'd like about her career.
As for HP, has anyone done a good job there? Carly Fiorina had the Compaq debacle, while Leo Apotheker wasted $9 billion buying Autonomy to turn the company into the American SAP.
You couldn’t take screenshots to share.
What absolute moron thought that would be a good idea? Presumably some Boomer who couldn’t be bothered to ask an intern what a meme is.
Netflix doesn't allow screenshots on mobile devices. Neither do Crave (in Canada) or Amazon Prime.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159892/republicans-meg-whitm...
No, don't you understand I totally want to pay $10 a month to hold my phone awkwardly and watch 10 minute videos.
What could go wrong
Please especially don't do that to dance on someone's grave. I'm sure that you can express your substantive points thoughtfully.
But this is a massive company which pumped VC money into an untenable idea. I definitely wouldn't have this level of snark if an independent developer, or at least a good faith startup had to shut down.
Which way is that?
> Quibi also faces a patent infringement lawsuit filed by interactive video company Eko, which alleges that Quibi stole its technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically on phones from Eko.
technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically
What da fak!
10 min episodes and you can finish a season in a night is exactly what people want.
Stuff like flipping screens and 'phone only', not so. But they were very easy to pivot on. (Which they did)
So you might think you are smart saying this is obvious, but it's not.
It's only an amount of content issue. Which we also know is solvable. But it's not clear exactly how.