Report: Investors were informed after company couldn't find an acquisition bidder.
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Quibi streaming service shutting down after less than one year, $1.75 billion
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Allegedly. Haha. I think "marketing" and "platform technology development" need to be said with air quotes.
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The massive marketing push trying to make Quibi happen left a bad taste in my mouth right from the start. I'm glad that, in this case at least, throwing money at the problem did not work (although I do have a feeling that the Quibi leadership will somehow walk away well compensated for failing so well)
The positive is that I believe Quibi's content licensing terms were relatively good for creators, allowing re-editing after two years and only remaining exclusive for seven years (although no idea what that means now that Quibi is shutting down)
Still, imagine if you took all the billions Quibi wasted trying to impress their fellow kids and on hiring big names, and instead supported tens of thousands of new/underrepresented creators and gave them a platform that spotlights their work better than youtube. Quibi could have been worse, but still seems like such a waste
The positive is that I believe Quibi's content licensing terms were relatively good for creators, allowing re-editing after two years and only remaining exclusive for seven years (although no idea what that means now that Quibi is shutting down)
Still, imagine if you took all the billions Quibi wasted trying to impress their fellow kids and on hiring big names, and instead supported tens of thousands of new/underrepresented creators and gave them a platform that spotlights their work better than youtube. Quibi could have been worse, but still seems like such a waste
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Excuse you, I have to pull down the quick settings, unlock rotation, then slide the settings back up. That's 3 whole thumb movements (6 if I'm laying on my side in bed and need to relock rotation) and a grip change. Too much work, easier to just pay a monthly fee for a poor selection of pre-cropped portrait videos.
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All the creators retained copyright, so they can take it to any other streaming service they are able to sign a deal with.
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The Verge shilling them with multiple articles in a single day like "Why Quibi is actually not stupid" was the best. Especially when they turned off comments after the first couple because people were absolutely not buying it.
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She's great at spending enormous sums of money on failed projects though.
She retains the record for the most money spent on a Governor's race, she far, far outspent Jerry Brown, a guy that is known for squeezing pennies and slashing budgets to balance them - and lost the election in California spectacularly.
...with a resume like that, I think her position in the company kinda makes sense...
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I think the real question here is what will happen to the groundbreaking patented technology of a video stream that changes when you rotate the screen.
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I mean, everyone knows the way to launch a video streaming platform is with free content - user generated videos, user pirated videos ("Gosh! We had no idea users were uploading full episodes of TV shows, movies, and music videos), video game livestreams/let's play videos, and social media influencers ("Welcome to my makeup tutorial!", "How to make sourdough bread with this $300 bread maker") ,etc.
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Of course, they literally launched their smart-device apps *yesterday* in order to stay relevant. That worked well.
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/2 ... id-tv-app/
https://www.androidpolice.com/2020/10/2 ... id-tv-app/
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firefox on your phone should be able to install the add-on ublock origin, that was the reason i switched to firefox to have one browser on all platforms with adblocking (no offense intended to ars but most ads these days that ive ever come across never behave well. ars may well be the better behaved among sites with regard to ads)
one browser to rule them all, one browser to mind them one browser to bring them all and in the darkness bind them
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I'm pretty sure her next move will be to build a Nuclear Power Plant. . .
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Meg Whitman didn’t buy WebOS, Leo Apotheker did after the initial deal was announced by Mark Hurd. Whitman was after Apotheker.
HP has had a succession of awful CEOs. In the last 20 years, it had Carly Fiorina (burnt money by buying Compaq, fought with the founder families and got fired for being utterly inept), Mark Hurd (got fired for “submitting inaccurate expense reports” after being investigated for having a relationship with a contractor - before that, he actually made HP execute for a change), Apotheker (previously fired from SAP for spying on Oracle, trying to kill anything hardware at HP before being fired) and finally Whitman. Whitman isn’t even in the bottom half of that list - both Fiorina and Apotheker were clearly worse.
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I knew this wasn’t to last, limited selection, awful design that didn’t showcase what any of the offerings actually were. A customer could only buy into the service on faith.
Downright bizarre.
Downright bizarre.
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Jeff Zucker. current head of CNN, was the former head of NBC.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of Quibi, was a Paranount exec, president of Disney's studio section, co-founder of DreamWorks, and head of the DreamWorks Animation spinoff. This ehole thing was a bad idea, but it's worth noting the varied successes he had before.
Jeffrey Katzenberg, the co-founder of Quibi, was a Paranount exec, president of Disney's studio section, co-founder of DreamWorks, and head of the DreamWorks Animation spinoff. This ehole thing was a bad idea, but it's worth noting the varied successes he had before.
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In the sense that they were throwing some money at a Nish Kumar show and I quite like him this is sad. In the sense that the last thing we need is another dozen streaming services continuing to fracture ever smaller amounts of content into ever higher monthly fees it will definitely not be missed.
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Strange I actually thought it was a great fit for the Quibi format. Even when it was on TV it was just a strung-together series of short skits.
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"Video service fails as people have more time than ever to use video service..."
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Yeah, that sounds like they were hoping to lure some kind of last minute buyer/investor who then either pulled out or didn’t materialize.
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That's a good argument for releasing it on YouTube. At most, this should've be a category on an actual streaming service. We could've got a lot more than a failed company/successful investor looting scheme if Netflix or someone had poured a couple billion into developing and promoting short form content.
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Katzenberg became the "head" of DreamWorks New Media and became a consultant for NBCUniversal when they purchased DreamWorks Animation.
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I saw a bit of chatter around how the short-format seemed purposefully designed to get around SAG and other Hollywood union rules. So they were paying for content, but it seems they weren’t paying cast and crew industry rates for the content. Which raises the question who they were paying.
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"Let's take the concept of webisodes and other short-form video, which are all over YouTube for free, and start charging for them while drastically limiting the number of devices that subscribers could watch that content on."
Hard to say which was stupider - the original idea or the people who lined up to throw money at it after the initial investment ...
Hard to say which was stupider - the original idea or the people who lined up to throw money at it after the initial investment ...
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Their pitch of making normal shows bit-sized was immediately zeroed out by the fact that every other video service remembers exactly where you left off already. So all their shows are already whatever size you want them to be. Blaming Covid is a total cop out. It was a terrible business idea from the beginning, entering into a wildly over saturated market.
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I used Firefox on Android with an adblock plugin, but since I switched to iOS, I started using browsers that have built-in adblocking, which I don't believe Firefox does. I was using Adblock Browser, but after I updated to iOS 13 it kept incessantly crashing, so I ended up on Brave.
And my OG Surface is too memory-starved to run Firefox in its modern form; in fact, it can barely run Opera. :/
That reminds me, when I first started using iOS, I almost gave up on it because how bad of a browsing experience Safari was, between the ads and the lack of inertial scrolling. Fortunately, Adblock Browser fixed both of those. The way that scrolling would come to a halt when you lifted your finger was absolutely maddening. They've since changed that behavior.
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Revolve around smartphone screens?
You mean the screens attached to phones with data caps? The same plan with zero rated video services from the carrier to occupy the subscriber's time?
Brilliant business plan. How could they not succeed...
You mean the screens attached to phones with data caps? The same plan with zero rated video services from the carrier to occupy the subscriber's time?
Brilliant business plan. How could they not succeed...
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I meant "the Quibi format wasn't doing it any favors" in the most literal sense. The format change didn't really hurt the show all that much, but it wasn't really an improvement either, mostly because the short skits were still too short for the Qubi "7-10 minutes per episode" mandate. So you had a collection of skits, and an episode "arc" that they'd come back to between other skits, except the episodes were shorter, so the arc bits didn't have the time to breath and develop.
If they had released it like CC has released "clips" on Youtube, where each skit is its own video, and you can watch as many, or as few, as you want, I think it might've actually had an advantage on the format.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hpwesfK ... vtZLYGy6sH
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Thank you for that comment. Until just now I haven’t seen a reference (that I recall) explaining their name. Maybe I read it somewhere when the forgettable service was announced, but didn’t care enough to remember?
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Nobody at Quibi has apparently watched Jurassic Park. - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kY-pUxKQMUE
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Their price and content had the real problem.
If it was $2 a month no ads. Maybe with the amount of content they provided. The issue with "Binge/Netflix" Watching is all your content is up and with Quibi in 2 hours you blow through any season of shows they have. So in about 30 days you can go through all their shows rather quickly.
I had a T mobile subscription because they gave it to me for 6 months. No way i would pay $5 a month for it to play an Advertisement to me every time i started a video. or resumed a video after pressing exit by accident.
The shows were rather lackluster and filled with more holes then a normal movie of the same length would have. Where every 7-9 minutes you'd get some forced dramatic pause.
I mean the only show that really fit the format was Reno 911. And that was because the show was like that before Quibi. Short sketches pieced together. Vs something like Ken Block Vs Idris Elba where it was half why are we here? Oh yeah that fat paycheck.
If it was $2 a month no ads. Maybe with the amount of content they provided. The issue with "Binge/Netflix" Watching is all your content is up and with Quibi in 2 hours you blow through any season of shows they have. So in about 30 days you can go through all their shows rather quickly.
I had a T mobile subscription because they gave it to me for 6 months. No way i would pay $5 a month for it to play an Advertisement to me every time i started a video. or resumed a video after pressing exit by accident.
The shows were rather lackluster and filled with more holes then a normal movie of the same length would have. Where every 7-9 minutes you'd get some forced dramatic pause.
I mean the only show that really fit the format was Reno 911. And that was because the show was like that before Quibi. Short sketches pieced together. Vs something like Ken Block Vs Idris Elba where it was half why are we here? Oh yeah that fat paycheck.
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Quibi was always a terrible idea. It read like an idea designed by 60 year old Hollywood producers trying to stay relevant in a online streaming world without understanding why people watch YouTube and TIkTok.
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She might be a pioneer of breaking glass ceilings by failing upwards.
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We're building a whole new way to measure time! What have we got so far?
10 days = 1 Mooch (remember him?)
6 months = 1 Quibi
Anything to add to the failure time pantheon?
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Yes, every service does tell you what to watch. But they tend to not try to change the overall presentation of that content all that much.
Most successful Netflix competitors either do free with ads, or charge for ad -free. Also, they don't tend to completely unearth the TV episode as-a-concept. (nobody cares because they have heard of this little thing called the pause button, and can consume normal bits of whatever content already.)
Typically, your defining factor for success is locking-down some sought-after streaming library, plus be prepared to spend money on a few high-profile new series. Nobody cares about how you structure your episodes.
Quibi's failure happened because it did none of the above, and instead concentrated on the "oh hey, we've got this interesting new format of 10-minutes-per-episode, with ads. Can I sign you up for two years?"
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I still scratch my head at who the target audience was for this, especially considering they didn’t have a free tier, didn’t allow for screenshots, or even have a TV app when they launched.
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Got to love 2020, when you don't even need to have a years worth of expenses on hand to start a business (well, I mean, an unsuccessful business).
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