Quibi: the streaming age’s most embarrassing disaster
Times were a lot simpler when there were only a couple of streaming services to choose from, but now there are so many the competition has started to devour itself whole. Not every new platform is going to succeed, but it’ll take some doing to dislodge Quibi as the on-demand era’s most dismal failure.
There’s only so much money any subscriber has to spare on shelling out their monthly fees, so any newcomer into an increasingly crowded market needs to ensure it has a unique selling point. Quibi certainly had that, but it wasn’t one that anybody wanted, needed, asked for, or was remotely interested in.
Spearheaded by former Disney chairman and industry mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg, the company raised $1.75billion from investors ahead of its launch, assembling a top-tier cadre of creatives to drive an ambitious slate of original content. Seeking to fill a gap in the market, Quibi was going to focus exclusively on short-form content that was designed to be watched by people on the move.
Instead of feature-length movies and episodic TV shows, the streamer was guided by quick-fire episodes that ran for ten minutes or less, seeking to capture commuters, younger viewers, and generally those with shorter attention spans who either didn’t have the time or the patience to watch films and series in sittings spread out over a great period of time.
Not the worst idea in the world in microcosm, but the implementation of a vertical aspect ratio horrified the purists. It didn’t have to be watched that way, even if the mere thought was enough to make the blood boil in many. Pushing the boat out before it even had the wind in the sails, Quibi spent a billion dollars on content to make an instant splash in an area with too much content to go around.
There was a remake of The Fugitive with Kiefer Sutherland and Boyd Holbrook, another remake of Most Dangerous Game with Christoph Waltz and Liam Hemsworth, Kevin Hart’s self-aware action comedy Die Hart, anthology horror series Steven Spielberg’s Dark backed by the man himself, a heist thriller starring Ice Cube, and Sam Raimi’s anthology 50 States of Fright, so there was a decent-sounding line-up in place.
The worst thing Quibi ever did was stick to its launch date, though. There literally wasn’t a worse month in modern human history to launch a splashy streaming service intended to be watched entirely on mobile devices by people on the go than April 2020. Nobody could have predicted it, but that $1.75billion instantly looked like a risky gambit from day one.
In theory, it might have fared better were it to be unveiled at a different time, but rolling out during a period where great swathes of the global population were being told to stay indoors and not to go anywhere ensured that Quibi never had a shred of momentum to work with.
That’s not to say it was doomed from the outset because viewing figures and subscription numbers to virtually every other platform exploded for the very same reason. Folks were at home all day, every day, and needed lots of things to watch to eat away at their time, and streaming provided exactly that. But by stuffing itself into the mobile and device-focused box, Quibi shot itself squarely in the foot.
Failing to even crack two million paying customers, the experiment was over before it had started in earnest. Six months after its launch, and Quibi was no more. When the announcement was made in October 2020, the platform only had 500,000 subscribers and was haemorrhaging cash like there was no tomorrow. Fortunately, for the accountants anyway, there really was no tomorrow.
In the single most embarrassing fall from grace the streaming age is ever going to see, nine months after being heralded as a game-changer in an ever-evolving industry, Quibi sold off its entire content library to Roku’s parent company for $100 million. Was that the end of the embarrassment? Not quite, because in September 2023, Roku underwent a purge of its own content library and removed almost all of the content it had acquired from Quibi to send it into the ether of on-demand nothingness.
