$1.75 billion up in smoke in only 6 months
Quibi streaming service shutting down after less than 1 year | Ars Technica
The whole thing reminds me of the joke “If I were an evil overlord” list floating around the internet a few decades ago, where one of the items was to have a normal 5-year-old on staff and not implement any schemes that the 5-year-old could easily point out the problems with.
Maybe when you raise more than a billion dollars for an app, you should have an average teenager on the board who will tell you “No one’s going to pay $10/month for this dumb idea”.
like the article says it was very hard to watch at home. they really went all in on a phone app.
Well that was a quick bite.
The thing Quibi did best was shoot itself in the foot. The concept was shakey to start. Then they decided that none of their content could go anywhere else, which meant no clips could go viral on other platforms. That was basically the best/only way to raise their profile and attract new viewers. I’m pretty sure content could only be played on phones until several months in - when the crepe was already being hung.
Having said that, Will Arnett’s takedown of The Littlest Hobo (a horrible '80’s Canadian TV show) on his Quibi series might be the funniest thing I’ve seen all year.
They had the bad timing to start a company centered on short-form videos suited to watching away from home (while on the bus to work, for example, or sitting in a boring meeting) at a time when everyone was stuck at home. And they didn’t own the content so there was little interest in buying out the company.
Still amazing that they blew through almost two billion in less than a year. I wonder if it’s possible to blow through more in less time. (Note to any deep pockets out there; I’m willing to try doing so. Just give me three billion USD and about six months to get my plans ready. I’ll get back to you with a business plan.)
It’s a lot more fun if you just wing it.
Unless the production values were much higher, that just sounds like what you can watch easily on YouTube, for free. What was supposed to be the draw that you would pay money for?
BTW, I literally never heard of Quibi until I was hearing of its pending demise. That also seems to be a big problem. We are in the age of streaming TV and movies, which is the companies I was following.
Yes, their shows had high production values and big-name actors. Their adaption of the short story The Most Dangerous Game, for example, starred Liam Hemsworth. And I believe (never watched any of it myself), the stories were serialized, so ideally you wanted to watch each episode.
BTW, you didn’t see their commercials? Quibi even had one, or a couple, for the Superbowl. Their launch was definitely high-profile.
I’m totally willing to try that as well. PM me and I’ll give you instructions for where to wire the three billion.
I don’t have three billion.
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Anymore.
Didn’t watch the Superbowl this year, as they keep leaking their ads ahead of time. I otherwsie don’t watch ads ever. I watch stuff on the Internet only at this point. I can pay the individual creators on Patreon when they need the money, so I see no reason to put up with the annoyance of ads. I adblock everything, even using Sponsorblock to avoid in-video ads.
For me, word of mouth is usually enough to find out about anything new. I know about all the TV/movie streaming services from people talking about shows they watch or telling me to check out a trailer or something like that. And I got none of that Quibi.
So, despite apparently a good ad push, I wonder if they didn’t get a good word-of-mouth campaign going.
Content creation is super expensive, especially these days with everyone making TV shows and so many streaming services out there.
I call it MoviePass II.
I think their mistake may have been to go to subscriptions right away. It’s tough to convince people to pay for a new idea they haven’t seen.
They probably should have followed the Hulu route and offered the service for free in order to present the service to the widest possible audience and build up an customer base. Then switched over to subscriptions.
Per the NPR story this afternoon, their content could only be played on mobile devices until literally yesterday.
I’m not sure even that would have helped - given the timing. As I remember, they gave away 2? months free if you downloaded the app. Which isn’t quite the same thing as fully free - but you could have watched without paying.
I don’t know if it was a bad idea or a mediocre-to-interesting idea with really horrible timing. It wasn’t designed for you to watch at home - and all of a sudden “everybody” was home all the time. I don’t need a 5 minute show on my phone (that isn’t designed to be binged) when I can watch a “full length” show on my screen just as easily. I can’t talk about it to co-workers at the watercooler because there’s no watercooler. I’m pretty sure the shows weren’t routinely reviewed by major media outlets. The stars couldn’t do the talk-show circuits when the channel launched because the talk-show circuits pretty much shut the hell down when quibi was launching.
I read something today (don’t remember) that quibi was actually making new content and paying their content creators, which made their launch more expensive than (some of) the other services that stream content they already owned or were showing content that other people were allowing them to use in exchange for exposure.
I missed it too. Or at least they never registered in my brain. I had to google them when I saw this thread.
From the people who brought you Judge Crissy Tiegen…
I’ll second that - I didn’t hear anyone talking about it, or trying to get me to watch a Quibi video that they liked. I also don’t remember any of their commercials, so they definitely didn’t stick. Then again…
I’m not sure how one would expect word of mouth to work if there’s no way to send the videos to a friend for them to check out and get hooked. Keeping the content exclusive might have theoretically made them more money, but it looks like an active impediment to getting people interested in the platform.
I’ve bought a number of games because I watched someone doing silly youtube vids of the game. And gotten into a number of shows because someone shared a clip or compilation of it, or because they played the show on a TV while I was visiting. I don’t see how they’d catch my interest in their content in the first place if it’s all strictly paywalled.