After raising nearly $2 billion in funding and promising to reinvent the way people consume entertainment programming, Quibi is shutting down, according to a report in theJeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman's short-form video startup began informing investors of the move on Wednesday, per, capping off a six-month struggle to attract subscribers to Quibi's slate of mobile-first shows.
Katzenberg had been dreaming up the idea that turned into Quibi for several years. After he sold DreamWorks Animation to NBCUniversal in 2016, he set about putting the pieces in place to launch a mobile-first video business. He tapped Whitman to lead the business as CEO and together the duo raised $1 billion in funding from a cadre of investors that included every major Hollywood studio.
His plan was to lure subscribers with premium shortform stories that could only be watched on a mobile phone, and he quickly signed on filmmakers including Antoine Fuqua, Sam Raimi, Guillermo Del Toro and Catherine Hardwicke to make projects for the service. But Quibi's April launch was derailed by the early days of the novel coronavirus pandemic, which forced people to stay home and and made it harder for the company to sell them on paying $5 per month for programming meant to be watched on the go. The service has struggled to build up subscribers, coming in well below internal projections, according to a source.
Still, the shutdown will come as a surprise to many inside and outside the company, which has been conducing business as usual, per one source who has business at the streamer, even as Katzenberg and Whitman explored strategic options.
. Rev_Scarecrow ^
Who's having HBO Max issues? I have it on 3 different TVs, 2 iPads, 1 iMac, 2 laptops, and my Android phone.
😂😂😂😂😂😂😂
The fuck is Quibi
Re-edit all the content to full length episodes lol. Everything on there felt like a re-cap cut down episode of itself.
Amazing how even after flushing 2 billion down the toilet some people will get another chance in business.
LoL who didn’t see this coming!
1/ I can watch any content in 10minute increments because of a pause button. Don’t need Quibi. 2/ Only on mobile, if Netflix was only on mobile it wouldn’t be the big dog it is. 3/ Too much big money/big names & not enough of an organic, authentic, natural genesis for a startup.
Anyone under the age of 40 could see that this company was doomed to fail. They didn’t understand short form content, they didn’t understand their audience, they didn’t even understand how apps work. Yet they managed to con investors out of $2 billion.
who couldve predicted this
I tried it. It wasn’t a bad concept. But the programming was awful. And with so much quality elsewhere, it wasn’t worth the price.
Lol
Guess what happens when you lowball all your vendors into oblivion? Your final product is GARBAGE. Good riddance Quibi, and fair warning to anyone who expects to get anything, by paying nothing.
lookner
Smart people got hustled out of their money by really smart people
Wow. That went by Quibi.
Yeah. That was a really dumb idea. Who are the idiots that funded that?
Every business she works at gets closed... I would never hire her! RIPPALM
Oh man, I should have taken the TMobile deal😤🙄
IamAaronsTweets lol
Pornhub better
Somewhat ironically, they were only around for a quibi.
lookner OH NooOo who saw it coming.
Sounded like a vanity project from the start with the public being told what they want.
lookner Lol makes sense. Quibi suuuuux. PlutoTV is better!!!😂
Another victim of COVID 😢.
profgalloway here ya go...
money laundering
The whole thing was just a miscalculation. There were a lot of shows that looked good and I hope they release them elsewhere but the app itself was not appealing to me.
What was Quibi again?
jonlovett
Woah!! That was an expensive experiment!!😳
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