Embed from Getty Images

Struggling pretty much from the word go, Quibi is pulling the plug after only six months of being live. On Wednesday, Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg announced they will be kissing their elite pet streaming project goodbye, which has many asking, what went wrong? After-all, Whitman and Katzenberg were able to rustle up $1.75 billion in funding prior to Quibi’s launch. Only an unqualified US president could screw up that kind of surplus going in and both Whitman and Katzenberg are power-businessfolk, right? So what happened? For now, we don’t know, but folks have a lot of plausible theories.

Alas, tragedy has stricken a country full of potential streaming customers: Deadline reports that Whitman and Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg have chosen to dissolve the “quick-bite” streaming service after just half a year—a process that itself could take months. The app was pitched to us as the future of entertainment—but its rise and fall has been primarily defined by schadenfreude.

A cynic might argue that Quibi’s doom seemed inevitable from the start; it is, after all, an app for young “digital natives” designed by two sexagenarian billionaires whose cultural touchstones include Jane Fonda workout videos and the History channel series Grant.

The problems were never just philosophical. When Quibi launched, subscribers found out that the app didn’t allow the multi-tasking more established VOD players, like YouTube, have already made standard. So if you’re watching that Chrissy Teigen judge show, you have to really be watching it. The app also initially prevented subscribers from taking screenshots—effectively crushing any Quibi project’s best chance of getting talked about on Twitter. And that’s saying nothing of the patent infringement lawsuit from the interactive-video company Eko regarding the best part of Quibi’s interface: its seamless orientation-switching, which allows subscribers to watch shows in portrait or landscape mode.

And then came the cardinal issue with far too many nascent streaming services: The shows themselves were largely nothing to write home about. Save for the odd Emmy winner here or a campy Sam Raimi joint starring Rachel Brosnahan as a girl with a golden arm there, Quibi will likely be remembered, primarily, as a microcosm for 2020’s streaming apocalypse: So many platforms, so many shows, so many A-listers—and still, somehow, so little to watch.

In a recent essay, Vanity Fair TV critic Sonia Saraiya noted that streamers have adopted bloat as a convention—flooding an ever-growing number of streaming services with a deluge of series all produced at an increasingly frantic clip.

Quibi’s young user base, millennials, have less disposable income to spend on content that, increasingly, seems designed to exist rather than to enthrall. Many already have at least one, if not multiple, streaming subscriptions—for Netflix, or Hulu, or Amazon, or AppleTV+, or Disney+, or HBO Now, or Peacock.

Quibi never gained any traction with people who had no financial stake in caring about it because it was not designed for them. But it did illuminate a gap that’s become increasingly difficult to ignore—between what industry titans are producing and what consumers actually want.

[From Daily Beast]

I’m sure we’ll be hearing a lot more about the Fall of Quibi. In years to come, our kids will study the Quibi What Not to Do Model in business school. And I’m sure the answer is multi-layered but my money is that the foundation is hubris. The Daily Beast article began by reminding us that when Quibi was launching, Whitman gave a quote to Vulture in which she said:

There’s usually a premium version of what a service is. It often only attracts 5 to 10 percent of the market. Sneakers, bottled water. Water, by the way, is free. People pay for convenience and premium.

[From Vulture]

I think anyone that approaches a streaming service with a country club mentality has already completely missed their mark. Plus, cynical or not, the comment about two sexagenarians assuming they knew all about entertaining dem kidz was pretty spot on, although leave Jane Fonda out of this because if either of those two had asked Jane’s opinion on anything, they’d still be in business. Everything about Quibi shows that whatever research Whitman and Katzenberg did was to talk investors into forking over that kind of cash and swaying the star-power they did, and not any into the audience market they would ultimately be selling to. The fact that you couldn’t multi-task while watching alone was a built-in depth charge.

As for content, that’s a shame. So often I’ve watched a film and thought that it was a ten-minute short that got stretched to a full-length feature. I might get creamed for this, but the best example for me is the horror movie Mama. The original short absolutely *****ng terrified me and the film never even got close for me. So I would love a platform for high-quality shorts, like how Pixar airs theirs prior to their features. But it sounds like Quibi, instead, gave us a bunch of 10-minute duds. As for the Rachel Brosnahan short the article mentioned, The Golden Arm was only ever supposed to be a spoken ghost word story, the ending necessitates it. As a child, it scared me Every. Time. I. Heard. It. The minute you tell it in any other form, you lose it. So like Quibi, Rachel and her Golden Arm were doomed from the start.

Embed from Getty Images

Embed from Getty Images

Photo credit: Getty Images