Quibi, short for “quick bites,” started with big names and big money. Its founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, had co-founded DreamWorks Animation. Its chief executive, Meg Whitman, had run eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise. It raised $1.75 billion, from investors that included Disney, NBCUniversal and Viacom.
It launched in early April 2020 with nearly 50 shows, every episode under 10 minutes, made for phones. A feature called Turnstyle switched the picture between portrait and landscape as viewers turned the phone. It cost $4.99 a month with ads or $7.99 without, with a 90-day free trial.
Part of the appeal, as the Associated Press later put it, was supposed to be that you could watch while out, without a TV. “Our use cases are these in-between moments,” its chief technology officer, Rob Post, said in April. The launch came as the coronavirus pandemic kept people at home.
By May, Quibi said it had been downloaded about 3.5 million times and had 1.3 million active users. In an interview with The New York Times, as TechCrunch reported it, Katzenberg admitted that was “not close to what we wanted,” and the company’s projections had called for 7 million users and $250 million in subscriber revenue in its first year. “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” he said. “Everything. But we own it.”
On October 21, 2020, Katzenberg and Whitman published an open letter. Much of it was a list of things that had gone right. Hollywood’s most imaginative minds had produced “content that exceeded our expectations.” Engineers had built “a groundbreaking and delightful service.” Ten of the most important advertisers in the world had joined.
“And yet, Quibi is not succeeding,” they wrote. “Likely for one of two reasons: because the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing.”
“Unfortunately, we will never know but we suspect it’s been a combination of the two.” The pandemic was something they could never have imagined, they wrote, but other businesses had faced the same challenges and found their way through. “We were not able to do so.”
Other streaming services had grown with customers stuck at home, the Associated Press noted. Disney Plus had more than 60 million subscribers. Quibi didn’t release subscriber figures.
In a statement, Whitman added one more detail. “While we have enough capital to continue operating for a significant period of time,” she said, “we made the difficult decision to wind down the business, return cash to our shareholders, and say goodbye to our talented colleagues with grace.”