Quibi's Having a Rough Go

From the Wall Street Journal:

Quibi entered the market with big financial commitments from advertisers, enviable access to cash and two brand-name corporate leaders from the worlds of movies and technology. Its promise of a new storytelling format and Quibi’s deep pockets proved irresistible for many stars. The vision was to create short programs, 10 minutes or less, that people could watch on the go.

Quibi literally could not have launched at a worse time. It’s entire reason for being is to be consumed in the in-between moments while people are on the go. Except, for much of the last three months, no one has been going anywhere.

Quibi at CES / © Jason Aten

There’s also the reality that the content on Quibi isn’t very good. It just isn’t.

You can blame the first problem on the pandemic. The content problem, however, is squarely on the quixotic streaming company that never quite convinced the world that it needed 10-minutes-or-less “quick bites,” as the name stands for.

That isn’t to say it didn’t have a fighting chance. The company raised over $1.75 billion in funding. It planned to spend more than $300 million of that on content. But you can’t buy your way out of a bad idea.

At its current pace, Quibi will sign up fewer than two million paying subscribers by the end of the app’s first year, a person familiar with its operations said, well under its original target of 7.4 million. Quibi’s app download numbers have been falling in recent weeks, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower. Daily downloads peaked at 379,000 on its April 6 launch day but didn’t exceed 20,000 on any day in the first week of June, according to Sensor Tower.

Look, there are really smart people behind Quibi, on both the content and technology sides. Meg Whitman, the CEO, is about as experienced as you can be at running tech companies. There are few people with more content credibility than Jeffrey Katzenberg. When I met with the heads of the content and technology at CES in January, I was impressed by their demo.

The problem is, no one is impressed with the content, and no one is sitting on the subway or standing in line at Starbucks for 10 minutes right now.