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posted by takyon on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:44AM   Printer-friendly
from the Quibi-Quibbles dept.

From The Guardian:

Nearly three months ago, in early April, the $1.75bn content experiment known as Quibi lurched from its rocky, much-maligned promotional campaign into full-scale launch. The service offered a tsunami of celebrity-fronted shows segmented into "quick bites" (hence, "qui-bi") of 10 minutes or less – a Joe Jonas talk show, a documentary on LeBron James's I Promise school, a movie with Game of Thrones's Sophie Turner surviving a plane crash, all straight to your phone. At the time, many of us wondered if Quibi could deliver on its central promise – to refashion the style of streaming into "snackable" bites – or if, teetering under the weight of its massive funding and true who's who of talent as the world shut down, it would become shorthand for an expensive mistake.

The service, the brainchild of the DreamWorks Animation cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg and the former Hewlett-Packard CEO Meg Whitman – two billionaires deeply entrenched in Hollywood and Silicon Valley establishment – was "either going to be a huge home run or a massive swing and a miss," Michael Goodman, a media analyst with Strategy Analytics, told the Guardian. Given a string of bad news since its 6 April launch – missed targets, executive departures, Katzenberg singularly blaming the pandemic – and the sunset of its 90-day free trial with millions fewer subscribers than anticipated, the scales seemed decidedly tipped toward swing and miss. But while it's too soon to declare the end of Quibi, it's still worth asking: is the promise of the quick bite already over? And what went so wrong?

Previously: Meg Whitman-Run Streaming Service "Quibi" Launches, Reception Mixed

Related: Fox Could Buy Tubi While NBCUniversal Eyes Vudu


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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:58AM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @03:58AM (#1014372)

    One, I literally didn't know this existed. No one I know has been talking about it, IRL or online.
    Two, that kind of short-form entertainment on your phone exists. It's called Youtube.

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  • (Score: 2, Interesting) by takyon on Tuesday June 30 2020, @04:05AM

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Tuesday June 30 2020, @04:05AM (#1014375) Journal

    It's the boomer train wreck of the Streaming Wars [wikipedia.org].

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @06:21AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday June 30 2020, @06:21AM (#1014420)

    didn't know this existed

    Yip exactly this

  • (Score: 2) by driverless on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:23AM

    by driverless (4770) on Wednesday July 01 2020, @03:23AM (#1014866)

    I knew it existed, from a previous Soylent article, but had no idea what the point of it was. So it's a combination of two factors, people who don't know it exists, and people who know it exists but not why it exists.

    Oh, and $1.75B of VCs funding anything ending in dot-com, because just because it failed spectacularly the first time round doesn't mean it won't fail again if we do exactly the same thing twenty years later.