Quibi has all the earmarks of a flop

Quibi, the streaming service that promised to serve audiences “quick bites” of content designed to be consumed while on-the-go, launched in April, in the midst of a global pandemic that forced millions to stay home, but, despite the potential of a captive audience, Quibi has all the earmarks of a flop.

Christopher Rosen for Vanity Fair:

According to a new report from The Wall Street Journal, by September, the Jeffrey Katzenberg co-creation will have spent nearly $1 billion of the $1.75 billion it raised in investor money. As a result, Quibi will need to raise an additional $200 million before the end of June 2021…

It’s expected Quibi will have fewer than 2 million subscribers by April 2021, which falls more than 5 million short of the company’s initial goal. And while Quibi launched on day one with more than 379,000 app downloads, according to data from Sensor Tower, as the calendar has hit June, new consumers installing the app have dropped to below 20,000 daily…

Not that any of this accounting should come as a total surprise. Just five weeks after launch, Katzenberg spoke to The New York Times about the brand’s struggles. “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said, one of the many quotes from the piece that caught fire online. “Everything. But we own it.”

MacDailyNews Take: So, why is the coronavirus to blame? Fewer bus/train commuters made for a smaller audience for bite-size videos, we’d guess. Still, if your video service couldn’t build an audience from a millions of cooped up people hungry for something, anything, to pass the time, perhaps it wasn’t that compelling in the first place.

In the video below, Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg discussed the streaming service with Bloomberg News‘ Romaine Bostick and Scarlet Fu from CES 2020 in Las Vegas in January: