Nearly three months ago, in early April, the $1.75 billion content experiment known as Quibi lurched from its rocky, much-maligned promotional campaign into full-scale launch.
The service offered a tsunami of celebrity-fronted shows segmented into “quick bites” (i.e., “qui-bi”) of 10 minutes or less. So, users, had a Joe Jonas talk show, a documentary on LeBron James’s I Promise school, a movie with Game of Thrones’s Sophie Turner surviving a plane crash, all straight to a phone.
Some wondered if Quibi could deliver on its central promise – to refashion the style of streaming into “snackable” bites, fearing that television and drama would be dumbed down still further.
The service was the brainchild of the DreamWorks Animation co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman.
There was a string of bad news since its 6 April launch including missed targets, executive departures and Katzenberg singularly blamed the pandemic
The app staggered early, falling out of the top 50 most downloaded within a week of its launch, and only attracted about 1.5 million active users by the end of May, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Its rival Disney+ had 50 million subscribers drawn to Disney+, and Netflix has 183 million global users.
To be fair Quibi is only available in the US and Canada and most of those users were on the service’s free trial, which ends this month - a Quibi subscription is $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 a month without. The company anticipates landing just two million paying customers by the end of the year, less than a third of its first-year target of 7.4 million subscribers.
Quibi was on track to have spent $1 billion by the end of the third quarter of 2020 and though it raised an additional $750 million earlier this year, would require another $200 million of new funding by the second half of 2021 to stay afloat.
Advertising partners such as Pepsi, Taco Bell, Anheuser-Busch and WalMart are seeking to renegotiate their agreements with Quibi based on pandemic hits to their business and Quibi’s less-than-promised viewership.
The Wall Street Journal detailed longstanding friction in Katzenberg and Whitman’s working relationship. Its head of brand marketing, Megan Imbres, departed in April – another high-profile executive exit after the departures of the head of daily content Janice Min and Tim Connolly, the head of partnerships and advertising, last year. Staffers reportedly “seethed” at Reese Witherspoon’s $6m salary for voiceover work on six-minute episodes of the nature series Fierce Queens as Quibi’s poor performance threatened layoffs, according to Page Six. Witherspoon’s husband, Jim Toth is the head of talent and content acquisition at the company.
Quibi’s signature “Turnstyle” technology, which allowed contentto flow from portrait view to landscape and back again seamlessly on your phone, is tied up in a patent lawsuit with a deep-pocketed hedge fund.
While the pandemic did not help the rollout of a mobile-only service, Daniel D’Addario, the chief television critic at Variety who reviewed Quibi’s debut said that excuse does not work.
The content’s blanket strategy of celebrity – Witherspoon narrating a spot about cheetah female empowerment on Fierce Queens, Chrissy Teigen as Judge Judy in relationship court – was “uniquely poorly suited to this moment but “the format would’ve always been a disaster”, D’Addario said.
Quibi’s content felt less revolutionary than underbaked, slapdash concepts sledgehammering the viewer with abrupt hits of celebrity. The overarching theme was of “celebrity names without thinking through what they would be doing that is interesting or novel”, he said.
