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Media Businesses

Quibi Cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Streaming Service's Rough Start (nytimes.com) 72

Posted by msmash from the when-in-doubt,-point-at-coronavirus dept.
Quibi, the streaming app veteran executive Jeffrey Katzenberg started with Meg Whitman a little more than a month ago -- and for which it raised $1.8 billion -- is off to a rough start. From a report: Downloads have been anemic, despite a lineup that includes producers and stars like Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen. The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks, was designed to be watched on the go by people who are too busy to sit down and stream TV shows or movies. It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay-at-home orders across the country. "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," Mr. Katzenberg said in a video interview. "Everything. But we own it."

Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock'em All and the language-learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower. Even with a free 90-day trial, the app has been installed by only 2.9 million customers, according to Sensor Tower. Quibi says the figure is more like 3.5 million. Of those who have installed the app, the company says 1.3 million are active users. Mr. Katzenberg expressed disappointment with those numbers. "Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?" he said. "The answer is no. It's not up to what we wanted. It's not close to what we wanted." So nobody wants to use a short-form video app right now, except an increasingly growing number of people who are hooked to TikTok. Nobody wants to spend money on a service, but Quibi is free for first three months. Yeah, it's the coronavirus.
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Quibi Cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Streaming Service's Rough Start More

Quibi Cofounder Jeffrey Katzenberg Blames Pandemic for Streaming Service's Rough Start

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  • Or maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Jedi Holocron ( 225191 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @05:30PM (#60053446) Homepage Journal

    ...it just sucks.

    • Re: (Score:2, Insightful)

      by Anonymous Coward

      ...it just sucks.

      And it has a really stupid name.

      Unless you happen to see a story about it, you have no idea what the fuck "Quibi" is. This is a major marketing fail. Which is not surprising since Meg Whitman is involved.

      • Hey they could have named it DIVX!

        • Re:Or maybe... (Score:5, Informative)

          by Moblaster ( 521614 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @09:18PM (#60054154)

          It's not the name. The reason for Quibi's failure is very simple. They can't figure out what business they are in.

          It makes ZERO sense to make the whole point of your existence that you are a BITE-SIZE media service for people who are too busy to watch traditional media, then force-feed ADVERTISEMENTS to them at the beginning of the show. And make them pay for the privilege.

          It's absolutely insane and they are too greedy to understand the common sense lunacy of this double-dipping business plan that NOBODY wants. Either go FREE, supported by ads, or CHARGE with no ads. The "option" of a $5-w-ads/mo plan vs $8-add-free/mo plan does NOT solve the problem, and in fact, completely destroys their core value proposition because it self-contradicts its own value proposition! If you are a consumer too busy for traditional media, you DO NOT have 30 seconds or a minute to watch a dumb commercial, and it's offensive to tell consumers that is your value, then offer to charge them for the OPPOSITE. You become a wild weasel rather than a well-bred ferret seeking out a specific market. Nobody wants a weasel in their home.

          Sadly they did not have the clarity or guts to make a decision. And when you are doing something NEW like this, if you don't step up and decide your message, so people can TRUST you and KNOW your business model and TALK about it with INTEGRITY, then you are absolutely dead. Which Quibi is, with one foot in the grave. And they'll go broke blaming coronavirus instead of their own ability to decide who and what they are as a company.

          • Re: (Score:1)

            by jonadab ( 583620 )
            I think it's also the advertising campaign. I've seen the ads for this service. They are *annoying*. Under no circumstances would they make me consider voluntarily watching content from that provider, even if it were free.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by OzPeter ( 195038 )

        ...it just sucks.

        And it has a really stupid name.

        Unless you happen to see a story about it, you have no idea what the fuck "Quibi" is. This is a major marketing fail. Which is not surprising since Meg Whitman is involved.

        Oh the name is a bigger fail than you realize. There's also Cuibee and Cuibe and Cubii. All are totally unrelated to each other or to Quibi, yet all sound the same.

      • It's almost as it the name was carefully chosen to allow people to quibitz about it.

      • Meg Whitman is running it. She fucks up things.

    • Re:Or maybe... (Score:5, Insightful)

      by BeerFartMoron ( 624900 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @05:37PM (#60053492)
      When the entire world is sitting on the couch looking for something to watch and no one tries out your new streaming service...well, your new streaming service must really suck.

      • Re: (Score:2)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        At this point even if it was great it would probably fail. There are too many streaming services, content is spread too thinly.

        • It doesn't have to be great, it has to be novel and lucky, combined with being widely available. Seeing as they don't seem to have a free version, they're missing one of the key mechanisms for widespread adoption.

    • Re:Or maybe... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by phalse phace ( 454635 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @06:05PM (#60053560)

      ...it just sucks.

      This.

      Plus you have to pay $4.99/mo for the service. That's a poor value proposition when compared to something like Disney+ at $6.99/mo which has a lot more content and appeals to a wider age group.

      Snapchat has similarly short videos with their Snap Originals [snapchat.com]

      When they reported their 1st quarter earnings [snap.com] back on April 21, they said their newly released Originals series "Nikita Unfiltered" had over 20 million viewers

      - Total daily time spent by Snapchatters watching Shows more than doubled compared to Q1 2019.
      - In Q1 2020, over 60 Shows reached a monthly audience of over 10 million viewers, up from 50 Shows in Q4 2019.
      - Over 20 million Snapchatters have watched our new Snap Original “Nikita Unfiltered” since its launch in March 2020.

      Mr. Katzenberg is just making excuses.

      • Plus you have to pay $4.99/mo for the service. That's a poor value proposition when compared to something like Disney+ at $6.99/mo which has a lot more content and appeals to a wider age group.

        Or Youtube which does it for free.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by fermion ( 181285 )
      Evidently they pissed the fanbois that were provided unpaid promotional context for the service. These promotores now spend all their time making sure the service fails

      In any case, no one really knows what it is about, and few really care. Their only hope was to get word of mouth, and the legal team ended that.

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by guruevi ( 827432 )

      "despite a lineup that includes producers and stars like Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen"

      I would say it is "because", not "despite". But it's a msmash story, every celebrity has-been that has a particularly biased Twitter feed is now 'good'.

      But yeah it's a garbage streaming service that is not only overpriced ($7.99/month), it is aimed at the (very small) SJW and LGBTQ market. You have a problem when the 'best' shows on there are Reno 911 and Punk'd - which are

    • ...it just sucks.

      Obligatory: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by imidan ( 559239 )

      A streaming service that nobody asked for, run in part by a CEO whose most recent notable accomplishment is being removed from HP for accelerating the company's downward trajectory toward circling the drain (and before that, a string of losing political campaigns), unpronounceable name, no interoperability with any major social networking platform, inability to view the content on a TV if you want, plus they seem to have spent their marketing efforts advertising the platform... which absolutely nobody cares

      • Yep. That's the one. Run by the woman that once lead a toy company, a soap company and did absolutely nothing good for a computer company.

    • Line up: "Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen" Go woke, go broke.

  • The length of time seems wrong (Score:3, Informative)

    by SuperKendall ( 25149 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @05:31PM (#60053456)

    10 minutes seems like a really bad amount of time to me.

    If you want something quick, I'm not going to watch a YouTube video or anything unless it's under five minutes.

    If you want something longer form, ten minutes is just really short to bother committing to.

    So fundamentally the idea seems unsound - then on top of that you have the other issues they mentioned like not being able to put the content on a larger screen...

    That said I am actually surprised they have over a million regular users. That sounds way better than I would have expected, so it seems to me like they are doing OK, just not as well as they thought it would go.

    Time for an expectation reset I would say.

    • There's some really old marketing research behind this. I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just saying this 10-12 minute mark has a legacy in comedy and shorts scripting standards that predates the internet by decades, may even predate television.

      • I'm just saying this 10-12 minute mark has a legacy in comedy and shorts scripting standards that predates the internet by decades

        Is that stuff maybe all around bits within a longer form context though?

        Like for comics, I can see that being a good length - for a club where you are seeing a few different comics.

        Or for a variety show, maybe that's a good length for each act, within a longer show...

        Even talk show guests had about that long each. But I don't think you can rip out segments from the whole contex

        • Even talk show guests had about that long each. But I don't think you can rip out segments from the whole context of a longer event form and have any of those studies still apply...

          That seems logical some of the time at least, but on the other hand it has been working fine for years for Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" time blocks; several hours of evening programming for adults mostly made up of 15-minute time slots each populated by 11 minutes of show followed by 4 minutes of commercials.

          • Cartoon Network's "Adult Swim" time blocks; several hours of evening programming for adults mostly made up of 15-minute time slots each populated by 11 minutes of show

            That is an interesting point, there that short timeframe has seemed toward out really well...

            I wonder if part of the problem is the content Quibli has been creating...

            • I wonder if part of the problem is the content Quibli has been creating...

              Most likely, though I recall once an Adult Swim "bumper" (the short black dialogue screens they start and stop commercial breaks with) alleged that their own marketing research had painstakingly proven that the magic component was actually the 4-minute length of the commercial break. It was presented as a joke but maybe there's more to it.

    • I'm not going to watch a YouTube video or anything unless it's under five minutes.

      Unless you're obsessed with meme's most popular content is not under five minutes. Yeah it may work for you but the data points otherwise. Most content on Youtube seems to be quite smack on between 15 and 20minutes these days, and that includes the most popular channels. The best judge of this would be popular variable length videos, videos made up of multiple smaller chunks optimised for popularity. Like those garbage youtube channels like 5 minute crafts (average video goes for about 15min). Or PewDiePie

    • Pretty sure they had an ad for the service with some guy on a bus watching during his commute. So I don't think they were wrong with length of time or only making the content small-screen accessible based on who they were advertising to. Clearly they were wrong in thinking that enough people would be willing to sign up during a free trial period to have a reasonable conversion rate for subs. But blaming it all on getting hit by the coronavirus bus is a bit of a stretch.

  • Really? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @05:36PM (#60053484)

    Let me get this straight, people stuck at home bored don't want to use their online streaming entertainment service? Because of COVID?

    • Let me get this straight, people stuck at home bored don't want to use their online streaming entertainment service? Because of COVID?

      To be clear this service was proposing some kind of bizarre 10min snippet of content. Sounds great for the commuter or someone who has to get a device fix during their lunch break. But really COVID gives me the time to sit and enjoy some actual content, none of this sound bite crap.

      Speaking of crap, there's every chance that their service is just crap, but no doubt COVID isn't helping.

    • Their marketing was aimed at people waiting in line, or people waiting to get their hair done, stuff that people don't do anymore.

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by Orlando ( 12257 )

      No stoopid, it's precisely not those people it's aimed at. It's aimed at people who are busy and don't have the time. Duh.

  • The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks, was designed to be watched on the go by people who are too busy to sit down and stream TV shows or movies.

    Yes, if only those busy people could watch part of a show, then watch other parts later, or, if they're really busy, not watch anything at all.

    It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay-at-home orders across the country. "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," Mr. Katzenberg said in a video interview. "Everything. But we own it."

    Or, maybe it's just a product no one really needs and, certainly, don't need to pay for. But, hey, maybe that's just me -- and all the other people not signing up -- but keep blaming it on the coronavirus and maybe people stuck at home watching Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, ...

  • Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)

    by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @05:38PM (#60053494)
    Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Really? It explains what it is in the summary. It isn't for people with lots of free time, it is for busy people who don't have thirty minutes to an hour to sit and watch stuff. People with a lot of time were watching Tiger King on Netflix. It actually makes sense that a dramatic shift from busy people to non-busy people would affect a service designed *specifically for busy people*.

      How did this get modded up???

      • Re:What the hell? (Score:4, Insightful)

        by barc0001 ( 173002 ) on Tuesday May 12, 2020 @06:04PM (#60053554)

        Oh bullshit. I watch LOTS of 10-15 minute content while I am at home during this pandemic. The difference is, there's so much of that on Youtube and other platforms already for free that I have no desire to pay for some 10 minute 'premium' content.

        His product has little additional appeal over what is already FLOODING the current content markets and he's charging for it. It's a non-starter.

        > it is for busy people who don't have thirty minutes to an hour to sit and watch stuff.

        Lots of TV shows on Netflix that are 21-22 minutes an episode, which is less time than the commute on the train for me. Again, wrong product at the wrong price.

        • Oh bullshit. I watch LOTS of 10-15 minute content while I am at home during this pandemic.

          Do you not have any decent content to watch? Not everyone is wasting time. The statistics are clear, people are flocking to feature length content shows, even Youtube's viewership isn't amazingly up, not compared to Netflix or streaming service with normal length content.

          • People have different concepts of quality, as well as what their interests are.

            >The statistics are clear, people are flocking to feature length content shows,

            Right. Which is the POLAR OPPOSITE of what the service this post is about is. FTA

            "The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks"

            That's not feature length.

    • Suddenly people have lots of free time but can't go out for entertainment and you're saying this explains the failure of a service aimed at people with lots of free time that can be used at home?

      Their service was aimed at exactly the opposite. People with lots of free time sit and watch netflix and don't need a desperate fix with a 10min video short because that's all them they have while standing in line at Starbucks or waiting on a train.

      • And anyway when you're standing in line at Starbucks it's more like 3-5 minutes.

        • That depends on when you go to Starbucks and what it is you order. Most drinks at Starbucks just take 3-5 minutes to actually name.

          I'm reminded of the local cafe here which has a sign out the front: "We don't speak Starbucks, please order normal things." :-)

  • I'm already hesitant to watch something on YouTube when it reaches 10 minutes or more when I'm sitting at my desk. I can't imagine anyone "on the go" wanting to watch his tiny smartphone screen for 10 minutes.

    One minute? Two? Three? They should have done some real research and trials with people waiting at a bus stop, in taxi/uber/whatever rides, in subways, etc.

    Either you're watching the content or you're aware of your surroundings. If you think you can do both, it's because you're neglecting one of them. And ten minutes is an extremely long time to be oblivious to what's happening around you.

    • I'm already hesitant to watch something on YouTube when it reaches 10 minutes or more when I'm sitting at my desk.

      Yeah that's you, but the most popular channels online that aren't music videos typically exceed 10min runtime.

  • Well, my wife is a whore, if this is really a thread to complain about life.

  • I heard about Quibi when a friend told me about its dual stream landscape/portrait idea. The platform was such a crazy far-fetched idea that I knew it was going to fail, especially as a paid service. Ten years from now I'll be able to say, "Oh yeah, I remember Quibi. I worked on one of their show." :P
  • Quibi who? Quibi what? Not that I'm up to notch with the latest streaming news and shit, but wtf is/was that app or whatever? This looks like a fuckcolossal marketing fuck up. This should have popped up in my twitter, FB and Instagram feeds long ago. Nah, the pandemic ain't it. They failed to market it. That is all.
    • It popped up on YouTube a ton, but never advertised their content and often didn't even tell you what the service was. Their marketing department needs fired.

  • People will only pay to subscribe to so many services.

    Like with Apple TV+, Quibi doesn't have enough (quality) content (yet).

    • ...and like Apple TV:

      - If I can't get it for free (without signing up for a free trial)
      - If I can't get it bundled in with something else I really want
      - If I haven't heard of any of the stuff on it, and/or don't know that it has some stuff I do know ...then I won't bother trying it out. I've already got more stuff than I can possibly watch with Amazon and Netflix. You'll note, I got Amazon "for free" along with something I already wanted. I got Netflix because there was stuff on there I knew already and wan

  • The app sucks.
    The content sucks.
    The design sucks.
    The fact you cant watch things on anything except a smartphone sucks
    The daily essentials are not essential.
    The leadership her are the same people who failed billion dollar companies.

    Remember Helion Cloud?

    Remember When Disney started to suck and had to revert to the classics to reboot?

    Same people.

  • It's a vanity project by two retired billionaires who had nothing better to do. Of course they thought they knew everything and didn't have to do any serious market research.

    Actually, it's the second hobby project for Whtman - Hewlett-Packard was the first. The real story is that after losing her race for governor of CA, she was sitting around the house watching Oprah, and her husband suggested, "why don't you get a job?" So she joined the board of HP. Then when Leo Apotheker was finally recognized as

    • Their marketing was aimed at people waiting in line, or people waiting to get their hair done, stuff that people don't do anymore. 8 ball pool [8ball-pool.io] online
      • They also seemed to be under the mistaken impression that they were selling a name and not a service or a product. Most of the ads I got on YouTube didn't even tell me what the service was! The ones that did tell me didn't tell me WHY I should care about it. A streaming service should be advertising their content, not their slightly eccentric name!
  • The world has moved on from 10-min Looney Tunes cartoons. No one wants entire serious TV shows at that length.

    They literally made a product looking for an audience that doesn't exist.
  • Another pay service with ads. content Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen. omg who cares about them. It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay-at-home orders across the country. "I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," Mr. Katzenberg When you CAN'T pull in viewers during this, it sucks !
  • Who comes up with this crap?
  • I'd say it's a stupid idea in general, and that the conditions imposed by the shutdown would be conducive to /better/ success for a streaming service if it didn't suck? Isn't Netflix killing it right now?
  • Honestly, their sales pitch started with "Meg Whitman and Jeffery Kayzenberg are blahblahblah..." And I went back to watching shit on YouTube for free

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