Quibi launched on April 6, 2020, in the middle of the U.S. COVID-19 lockdown. The app drew 1.7 million free downloads in its first week, and then downloads dropped sharply, according to Yahoo Finance. After 10 days, it had fallen out of the top 70 free iOS apps.
The company had raised $1.75 billion before launch, per Yahoo Finance. TechCrunch listed investors that included Alibaba, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, Disney, Sony Pictures, Viacom, WarnerMedia and MGM. Katzenberg ran the company with former HP CEO Meg Whitman, according to CBS News.
The pitch for Quibi was short, highly produced videos made for phones. Katzenberg described the mission at a 2019 Fortune conference as “to tell two-hour movies in chapters,” Yahoo Finance reported.
Stars attached to the app included Reese Witherspoon, Steven Spielberg and Jennifer Lopez, per CBS News. It also offered a short-form version of 60 Minutes and won some Emmys earlier in 2020. Pricing began at $4.99 a month with ads and $7.99 without, according to Variety.
The new streaming app’s performance didn’t meet expectations. TechCrunch reported that Quibi had projected 7 million users and $250 million in subscriber revenue in its first year. Yahoo Finance said SensorTower data showed only 72,000 paying subscribers as of July.
Katzenberg blamed the pandemic early. “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything,” he told The New York Times in May 2020, as quoted by Yahoo Finance.
On Oct. 21, 2020, Katzenberg and Whitman posted an open letter that said, “Quibi is not succeeding,” and added, “Our failure was not for lack of trying,” per Yahoo Finance. The letter named two possible reasons, and the founders said they suspected a combination of the two, per CBS News.
The Information reported that Quibi would have $350 million left to return to shareholders, a figure repeated by TechCrunch and Yahoo Finance. Yahoo Finance noted that the figure implied roughly $1.4 billion spent in six months.
Whitman said in a statement that Quibi had “enough capital to continue operating for a significant period of time,” per CBS News. The company planned to use the proceeds of asset sales to pay liabilities and return any remainder to investors.
The app stopped working on Dec. 1, 2020, according to Variety. Users could no longer sign in or watch anything. Quibi had also wiped its social media accounts and hired LionTree to sell its assets.
The app is gone, but there are plenty of free places to stream instead.
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