northEarly three months ago, in early April, the $ 1.75 billion content experiment known as Quibi came out of its rocky and heavily maligned promotional campaign upon large-scale launch. The service offered a tsunami of celebrity-led shows segmented into “quick snacks” (hence “qui-bi”) of 10 minutes or less: a talk show by Joe Jonas, a documentary about LeBron’s I Promise school. James, a film with Sophie Turner’s Game of Thrones surviving a plane crash, all directly to her phone. At the time, many of us wondered if Quibi could deliver on its core promise: reshape the broadcast style into “snack” snacks, or whether, reeling under the weight of its massive funding and true who’s who of talent when the world closed down, would become shorthand for costly mistake.
The service, the brainchild of DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman, two deeply ingrained billionaires in Hollywood and the Silicon Valley establishment, “was going to be a big home run or a massive swing and a foul, “Michael Goodman, a media analyst at Strategy Analytics, told The Guardian. Given a string of bad news since its launch on April 6 (missed targets, executive exits, Katzenberg singularly blamed the pandemic) and the decline of its 90-day free trial with millions of subscribers less than anticipated, the balance seemed decidedly leaning towards the swing. But while it’s too early to declare the end of Quibi, it’s still worth asking: Has the promise of the quick bite already ended? And what went so wrong?
Since its launch, Quibi has been battered by a lot of disappointing news. The app wobbled early, dropping from the top 50 most downloaded within a week of launch, and only attracted roughly 1.5 million active users in late May, according to the Wall Street Journal, a drop in the cube at Compared to over 50 million subscribers attracted to Disney +, which launched in December 2019, and Netflix’s huge 183 million global users (Quibi is only available in the US and Canada). Most of those users were on the free trial version of the service, which ends this month (a Quibi subscription costs $ 4.99 a month with ads and $ 7.99 a month without). The company plans to get just 2 million paying customers before the end of the year, less than 30% of its first-year target of 7.4 million subscribers.
The much smaller than expected subscriber base left the billion dollar experiment penniless; The Journal reported that Quibi was on track to have spent $ 1 billion by the end of the third quarter of 2020 and, while raising an additional $ 750 million earlier this year, would require another $ 200 million of new funds for the second half of 2021 to stay afloat. Meanwhile, advertising partners like Pepsi, Taco Bell, Anheuser-Busch and WalMart were seeking to renegotiate their deals with Quibi based on pandemic successes in their business and Quibi’s less-promised audience.
Meanwhile, several unflattering reports have depicted infighting behind the scenes. The Wall Street Journal detailed the long-standing friction between Katzenberg and Whitman’s employment relationship. Her head of brand marketing, Megan Imbres, departed in April, another high-profile executive exit after the departures of daily content chief Janice Min and Tim Connolly, head of associations and advertising, last year. The staff were reportedly reportedly “angered” by Reese Witherspoon’s $ 6 million salary for voice-over work on six-minute episodes of the Fierce Queens nature series, as underperformance de Quibi threatened layoffs. (Witherspoon’s husband Jim Toth is the head of content and talent acquisition at the company.) Quibi’s “Turnstyle” technology, which allowed content to flow from portrait view to landscape and vice versa seamlessly on her phone, is tied up in a patent lawsuit. with a pocket coverage fund.
Bad press has filled a void of comments about Quibi’s actual content, despite a list of more than 50 original shows revealed in its trial period, which the company itself seems to recognize: “Look guys, we have a good show,” Quibi’s account tweeted with a positive story about the most dangerous game, a film starring Liam Hemsworth divided into chapters, an ironic admission of a service whose inherent lack of ability sharing (the application did not allow screenshots (excluding memes) stifled potential good expectation.
Katzenberg has blamed the pandemic for Quibi’s struggles and, to be fair, he did not help implement a mobile-only service designed for the interstitial moments of the weekday and teamed up with the power of the celebrity name to launch in no time. in which americans were quarantined with their televisions as celebrity culture burned. But attributing all of Quibi’s problems to the pandemic is “fallacious,” said Daniel D’Addario, Variety’s top television critic, who reviewed Quibi’s list of debut series. The celebrity’s overall content strategy: Reese Witherspoon narrating a spot about the female empowerment of the cheetah named Fierce Queens, Chrissy Teigen as Judge Judy in the relations court, was “exceptionally inappropriate for this moment,” he told the Guardian, but “The format would have always been a disaster.”
Notionally, Quibi strove to industrialize a new frontier of television: short stories, that is, episodes of 15 minutes or less, in their shortest and most expansive form. The concept isn’t entirely new to Hollywood: Netflix originals like Special, Bonding, and the comedy series I Think You Should Leave, as well as Nick Hornby’s State of the Union on Sundance TV, with 15-minute episodes, and have Long-running has been the staple of short-budget YouTubers and creators (think of Issa Rae’s Youtube miniseries, The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl, its precursor to HBO’s Insecure series). But Quibi’s speech was nothing less than redefining Hollywood’s corporate entertainment unit to the “quick bite.” “Five years from now, we want to return to this stage and if we succeeded, it will have been the age of movies, the age of television, and the age of Quibi,” Katzenberg told a crowd at South by Southwest in 2019. “What Google should be looking for, Quibi will be a short format video.”
But in practice, Quibi’s content felt less revolutionary than sloppy, sloppy concepts that hit the viewer with abrupt celebrity hits. The main theme was “celebrity names without thinking about what would make it interesting or novel,” D’Addario said. D’Addario added that his fragmented movies and unscripted offerings felt “undernourishing,” and offered few fringe benefits to the free celebrity fare on Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, or TikTok. Why pay for Quibi, when “if you want Chrissy Teigen’s snack content, their social media provides it for you without this hackneyed first-time installation in court.”
The Quibi experience has been decidedly less than fresh thanks to numerous obstacles incorporated into the service: first, the limitation only for mobile devices, which prevented viewing on a larger screen and also the ability to send text messages, scroll or perform Multitasking as you watch Content released to our fracture encompasses attention. The imposition of Quibi for mobile devices especially hampered the service, as many Americans were quarantined in their homes with the option of larger screens and constantly growing streaming services (Netflix and Hulu, obviously, as well as Disney +, Apple TV + and the new HBO Max) to fill them. .
Quibi’s business model assumed a never-ending appetite for entertainment until we died, but its terms, in short, mobile-only, paid subscription, included the top choice for consumers accustomed to frenetic, constantly refreshing and expanding fun on demand and on phones with YouTube and TikTok, free. “We are in a world where viewers expect to have control over what, when, where, how they are going to watch content, and Quibi has taken a lot of that from them,” Goodman said.
With the end of the three-month trial, can Quibi change the ship’s heading? “They are learning that the decisions they hoped to hang on to are not the things that consumers want,” said Goodman, who pointed to the sometimes-quality content of the service as a point in his favor; D’Addario pointed to Quibi’s most ingenious and sweetest options, Dishmantled, a cooking contest hosted by Tituss Burgess, and the queer culture contest Gayme Show, as promising ideas for an app that becomes less laughable the more it leans on a fun without seriousness and without burden.
Quibi’s saving grace may lie, ironically, in denying what was supposed to be his breakthrough: the groundbreaking mobile-only short-form service of the broadcast wars. Quibi has already indicated moving away from the mobile-only part, as the company is in talks with Amazon Fire and Roku to bring the app to television. And Quibi could get away from the harsh 10-minute limitations, allowing viewers to segment shows to their liking and creators more leeway. Which means Quibi’s survival might not depend on becoming the new Netflix, but becoming Netflix, perhaps a hard-to-swallow pill for a service that aims to become its own verb for a brief glimpse. “They are learning that the decisions they expected to hang the hat from are not the things that consumers want,” Goodman said. “It is not a pandemic, it is: do consumers want it?”
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