K Bye

October 22, 2020 5:21 AM

The mobile-focused streaming service Quibi, set up by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, has announced it will close just six months after its launch.

Previously.

posted by Cardinal Fang (51 comments total)

Fully committed to being shortform.
posted by solarion at 5:24 AM on October 22, 2020 [64 favorites]

Quibi lasted 28,512 Quibis. We hardly quibi’ed ye!
posted by adrianhon at 5:27 AM on October 22, 2020 [11 favorites]

What's that in scaramuccis?
posted by chavenet at 5:28 AM on October 22, 2020 [18 favorites]

Fragments of video in a fragmenting market competing for fragmented attention from a fragmented population hit a fragment of its targets.
posted by srboisvert at 5:33 AM on October 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

Oh no, that thing that I never got around to looking at is going away.
posted by octothorpe at 5:34 AM on October 22, 2020 [15 favorites]

That's a ton of money to have burned just to try and side-step actor's and writer's union rules.
posted by Thorzdad at 5:35 AM on October 22, 2020 [69 favorites]

This Twitter thread (sorry) from Maciej of Pinboard has an interesting and valid take on it.
posted by kimberussell at 5:42 AM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

I'm actually kind of sad for Quibi. For all its flaws and faults, they were trying something with an interesting and novel premise, and got an awful lot of content together in a really short time. If it was something creator-driven or less anti-union, I think people would have really been on its side. Maybe in another world, there's a version of Quibi that's cool and indie and people love it. I may be judging Quibi's shows by their titles and previews, but I bet that version has better content too.

I will also say, it does feel like a bit of a letdown that $1.5 billion can't buy you a streaming service. That's not going to look good for other groups trying to make their way into that market. (Do we even need more streaming services? Maybe? Who knows?)
posted by LSK at 5:45 AM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

If I had $1.5 billion to blow through in 6 months, I would spend it in entirely different ways than this
posted by hippybear at 5:48 AM on October 22, 2020 [54 favorites]

I mean if you set most of the $1.5 billion on fire (including reportedly $6 million for Reese Witherspoon to produce and narrate Fierce Queens, a nature documentary) then it's probably a tough job to rival the big players, sure.
posted by adrianhon at 5:50 AM on October 22, 2020

So what are they doing with the content they created for the platform?
posted by cmfletcher at 5:52 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

"They will identify “a suitable buyer or buyers for its assets,” in the coming months. The company does not own any of its many shows and films but has the rights to them for seven years, after which point the creators will then have the right to assemble and distribute them."

Potentially some other player might get the rights to the content, but realistically most of it's now buried in a virtual landfill. Even more potentially, after seven years, some of the creators might unearth stuff.
posted by Drastic at 6:02 AM on October 22, 2020

Cool, that thing I heard of but never checked out dies before I can get around to checking it out. Looks like my attention span was too short even for Quibi.
posted by tommasz at 6:08 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

And nothing of value was lost.

Except $1.75 billion.
posted by SansPoint at 6:16 AM on October 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

If I had $1.5 billion to blow through in 6 months, I would spend it in entirely different ways than this.

The Trump campaign will pay you handsomely for consulting services.

Well, not pay as such. They don't pay when they do have money. And now they don't. But they'd certainly love to hear your ideas.
posted by Naberius at 6:22 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

One of my favorite recurring bits on the new MST3k was from the "Lords of the Deep" episode where the bots kept creating shows on made up streaming platforms whose names were just legit enough to be possibly real. And they all sounded better than Quibi.
posted by AlonzoMosleyFBI at 6:23 AM on October 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

Also, apparently it was scam to shortchange labor, too!

I feel bad for the creators, but nothing but contempt for all the suits who thought this could possibly work.
posted by Xoder at 6:30 AM on October 22, 2020 [22 favorites]

I would say that this project likely went exactly how it was supposed to go, as something of a money laundering scheme.
Where did the 1.5 billion dollars wind up? Those people are the ones Quibi was created to please.
posted by seanmpuckett at 7:00 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

they were trying something with an interesting and novel premise, and got an awful lot of content together in a really short time

I thought so too. But then I looked at Quibi shortly after it was announced and was totally overwhelmed by the "awful lot of content." I am not sure how much of this ultimately launched, but a bunch of it looked like an AI bot generated show titles and concepts:

* Let's Roll With Tony Greenhand, in which a "world-renowned cannabis artist" creates an artistic joint for a celebrity and then they smoke it together.
* Elba vs. Block, in which Idris Elba (he's cool for sure, but...) gets into stunt driving and competes in mini-contests against a professional
* Memory Hole, in which Will Arnett talks with celebrities about forgotten Canadian pop culture events (???)
* Murder House Flip, a 'CSI-meets-HGTV' premise where a team of spiritual healers and house flippers turn houses where tragedy happened "from morbid to marvelous."

It's like when cable promises you 125 channels and 90 of them are weird ones like Cheddar and Newsy and stuff you never heard of.
posted by AgentRocket at 7:01 AM on October 22, 2020 [20 favorites]

All of those shows sound like background jokes from other shows. Like Bojack Horseman or 30 Rock could have had an episode about any of those.
posted by showbiz_liz at 7:18 AM on October 22, 2020 [27 favorites]

Then again, based on the descriptions I'd project more success for those shows than for Bojack. (So there's this depressed horse, you see, who used to be a hack sitcom dad - no, it's not like Mr. Ed, 'cause it's animated. Don't worry, we'll get really good writers.)
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 7:23 AM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

“The world has changed dramatically since Quibi launched and our standalone business model is no longer viable,” Katzenberg said. “I am deeply grateful to our employees, investors, talent, studio partners and advertisers for their partnership in bringing Quibi to millions of mobile devices.”

[snip]

“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said to the New York Times in a May video interview. “Everything. But we own it.”

Dude, you launched THREE MONTHS into a global pandemic, a month after most places in the US went to shelter in place, with more people than ever staying home all over the world, and you couldn't get customers for a streaming service. That's not coronavirus's fault.
posted by hanov3r at 7:28 AM on October 22, 2020 [18 favorites]

That's not coronavirus's fault.

In fairness, a mobile-oriented streaming service is a lot more attractive in a society where people are routinely more than 50 feet away from their home television.
posted by jackbishop at 7:37 AM on October 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

Apparently, as a T-Mobile subscriber, my whole family had free access to this. I never knew.

Was that coronavirus' fault, too?
posted by mookoz at 7:40 AM on October 22, 2020 [14 favorites]

This whole thing to me seemed premised on 2 erroneous premises --

Firstly, the execs who have noticed that their teenagers only watch TV while also doing something on their phones, disregarding the fact that they may be catching up on social media while watching a TV show they're not interested in or during the commercials, but that doesn't mean they want another tv show to watch at the same time;

And second, that people actually need or want a different medium to watch while commuting or while in line at a store, the post office, or the bank. Based on my commute in the Before Times... Basically everyone was watching The Office or Game of Thrones, they didn't need or want something vertical or short. That, and most people's commutes are long - I think around 45 minutes is average in NYC on public transit, and many people's are longer. I think most people would rather watch a 44- minute episode (or 2 22-minute episodes) rather than queuing up a whole season of something they'd never heard of.

I always feel bad for all the production people who are now out of work but I guarantee that they knew the writing was on the wall. They didn't know that we would be in a global pandemic with live-action TV almost completely curtailed when their gigs ended though. I hope they are not too badly impacted.
posted by matcha action at 7:56 AM on October 22, 2020 [4 favorites]

I mean if you set most of the $1.5 billion on fire

Here's a thought experiment: You set $XXX amount of money on fire, and make a YouTube video titled I Set $XXX On Fire For No Reason. What amount of money results in you making a profit via AdSense?
posted by oulipian at 7:58 AM on October 22, 2020 [9 favorites]

Here's a thought experiment: You set $XXX amount of money on fire, and make a YouTube video titled I Set $XXX On Fire For No Reaso

The KLF already done it.
posted by 1adam12 at 8:18 AM on October 22, 2020 [14 favorites]

I think I heard of Quibi around the time it launched? Maybe? But then never again until just now, and I definitely didn't recognize the name.
posted by one for the books at 8:20 AM on October 22, 2020

This Twitter thread (sorry) from Maciej of Pinboard has an interesting and valid take on it.

Pull quote: If you put Meg Whitman at the helm of the Titanic she would find a way to miss the iceberg and sail the ship into a volcano, because that is how powerful a failure magnet she is.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 8:24 AM on October 22, 2020 [30 favorites]

The roll-out strategy was basically 100% based on urban 14-35 year olds consuming the content during their not-driving-their-own-cars commutes being early adopters and promoters. So it's reasonably fair to say that Covid made that impossible.

Of course, that's not to say that the roll-out strategy was good - far too much content was evidently what a bunch of 60-something centimillionaires thought 25-year-olds would like, and the making it impossible to screen cap or snip video for inclusion in social media was dumb in a way that "dumb" fails to capture.
posted by MattD at 8:28 AM on October 22, 2020 [10 favorites]

This is one of those failures that doesn't feel very satisfying to have known it would fail as soon as they announced it. Stunning to think that 1.75 billion was blown on this.
posted by Chickenring at 8:31 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

the making it impossible to screen cap or snip video for inclusion in social media was dumb in a way that "dumb" fails to capture.

Yah - they seem to have missed the basic fact that "things the youths are doing on their phones (so they will like very short videos)" was, y'know, sharing stuff on social media.
posted by soundguy99 at 8:41 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Having read so much from so many people about quibi, and having a friend who wrote on one of the shows, it's half a comedy and half a tragedy.

It's insane how much money they set on fire to chase returns. Their strategy was: We get celebrities, people love celebrities, people will watch these celebrities, people will pay money no matter the context these celebrities exist in. This is a celebrity zoo that people will pay monthly for. We can skirt around unions and generally pay people less as an added bonus, but the main game is celebrities.

That was their M.O. right from the start, and most people who were involved in the creative side knew it was doomed way before even quarantine.

However, Quibi did give A TON OF PEOPLE their first credit. Credit being currency in entertainment, they had a massive hiring rush of dozens and dozens of very talented, very green people to steer and crew these sinking ships. Those folks are now back at square one, with a joke of a credit as well as, with the content lost to the ether, nothing really to show for the months of work put into whatever insane project they were leashed to.

The folks who worked on shows for Seeso faced a similar fate, but at least Seeso gave a shit about what they were making and were, sadly, believers that "good indy comedy = $$$$".
posted by Philipschall at 8:42 AM on October 22, 2020 [8 favorites]

Looks like Whitman will be OK, she'll probably be getting a golden parachute and a position in the Biden Cabinet.
posted by Glegrinof the Pig-Man at 8:45 AM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

>Stunning to think that 1.75 billion was blown on this

Money is indestructible, short of the Fed selling its assets, which it doesn't like to do...

Real (2020 $) per-capita USD money supply
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:01 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

I'm totally cool with rich people blowing their money on dumb stuff like this. It's pretty much the only kind of income redistribution that exists in the world today.
posted by srboisvert at 9:16 AM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

Film/TV producer (and MeFi's own) Keith Calder had a great take on this some time ago that I haven't seen elsewhere but feels self-evidently true:

Quibi made the biggest mistake in film/tv, and it’s a surprise given how successful the founders are. It’s ALWAYS better to be the top priority project for upcoming talent than the lowest priority project for big established talent. A huge strategic creative development error.

posted by DirtyOldTown at 9:21 AM on October 22, 2020 [10 favorites]

paraphrasing Network, "The 1% have taken trillions of dollars out of the paycheck economy, and now they must put it back! It is ebb and flow, tidal gravity! It is ecological balance!"
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 9:21 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

So per the will they now qualify for the $17.5 billion yes?
posted by riverlife at 9:45 AM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Those folks are now back at square one, with a joke of a credit as well as, with the content lost to the ether, nothing really to show for the months of work put into whatever insane project they were leashed to.

Who would have thought it would be possible that "working for credit" would actually cost you and not just be code for working for free.
posted by Mitheral at 10:07 AM on October 22, 2020

I'm totally cool with rich people blowing their money on dumb stuff like this. It's pretty much the only kind of income redistribution that exists in the world today.

I imagine much of it was redistributed to other rich people.
posted by Saxon Kane at 10:10 AM on October 22, 2020 [6 favorites]

I'm trying to figure out how this, Vine, and Periscope all failed. And yet TikTok is the biggest thing on the Internet. You can (and should) blame Vine and Periscope's failure on being acquired by Twitter, sure. But why Quibi? My only guess is you can't actually can't fake sincere organic popularity.
posted by Nelson at 10:28 AM on October 22, 2020

I think Vine was too short form to be more than a novelty... and Periscope was just live streaming, right?

TikTok crowdsources content from a massive audience and floats the best stuff to the top, and it's free. It doesn't seem like a mystery why this would succeed over a paid service with lousy content.
posted by zixyer at 10:42 AM on October 22, 2020 [3 favorites]

I'm actually kind of sad for Quibi. For all its flaws and faults, they were trying something with an interesting and novel premise

Much less so than you think. Most of Quibi's content was actually bog-standard drama and comedy - maybe weird examples of it (that Anna Kendrick show with the sex doll, for example), but nothing terribly revolutionary in terms of story or narrative.

What was supposedly revolutionary was the format of ten-minute episodes, but in practice what happened is that they were filming standard forty-minute episodes and cutting them into four pieces corresponding with the standard act breaks: it's fairly obvious if you watch a lot of a show in one go that's what happened. (This isn't surprising, because ten minutes is a very specific format for episodic narrative content that isn't well-suited to a lot of stories.)

Of course, the point of insisting that they're ten-minute episodes is that by doing so, you skirt a lot of union regulations that exist in Hollywood expressly to protect crew jobs and duties that would apply if you were filming forty-minute episodes. That's the actual "novel premise" with Quibi.
posted by mightygodking at 10:57 AM on October 22, 2020 [16 favorites]

If Jeffrey Katzenberg wanted to publish original short-form video content he should've made a Youtube channel like the rest of us.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:31 AM on October 22, 2020

If I had $1.5 billion to blow through in 6 months, I would spend it in entirely different ways than this

Are you challenging me to a Brewster's Millions?
posted by Servo5678 at 12:04 PM on October 22, 2020 [2 favorites]

I think the real problem is that they didn't add a + to the name: Quibi+
posted by davidmsc at 12:07 PM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

and the making it impossible to screen cap or snip video for inclusion in social media was dumb in a way that "dumb" fails to capture.

I wouldn't be surprised if there's some larger media play here, where the money lost on Quibi as a delivery platform itself really was incidental to Katzenberg and Whitman creating a network with a library of top talent. Whomever selected the shows and celebrities definitely had a knowledge of what's popular on social channels. It isn't like they had Sheriff Lobo. So I find it hard to reconcile the ability to attract top talent, great show ideas and a platform that was on the verge of being unusable. Someone who knew that an ASMR channel would work didn't also know that having a locked down platform you couldn't engage with other social networks was a good idea?

I would not be surprised through clever accounting, careful bidding off of rights and royalties, seeing an article about how Quibi actually ended up being profitable 5 years later. Or perhaps not, because if they're good at hiding true profit and loss they might get away without any press. Outside of tech companies seeking an IPO, there's really no reason to hold a press release letting everyone know that the loss you declared in 2020 was rolled into complex legal structures that provided a steady and substantial cashflow to key investors.
posted by geoff. at 12:29 PM on October 22, 2020

It's amazing how little buzz they managed to generate with this thing. I've seen more talk about the company itself than about any of the content. I'm on Twitter daily and FB a few times a week and never saw anyone talking about a single one of their shows on any social media.
posted by octothorpe at 1:40 PM on October 22, 2020 [1 favorite]

Like a lot of people I found this easy to predict. I also have been waiting for youtubers to start releasing their unaired Quibi episodes/failed pilots and wouldn't you know it Aussie DIYer Annika Victoria just posted her pilot.
posted by muddgirl at 10:30 PM on October 22, 2020 [5 favorites]

Thanks for the context, muddgirl! I follow Annika Victoria but hadn't gotten around to watching this one yet (and wouldn't have known what app was being referred to, hah)
posted by brilliantine at 9:15 AM on October 23, 2020