Quibi Is Shutting Down
wsj.com
wsj.com
I actually wanted to give my money to Quibi, but they made it too hard to do so. I really wanted to see the new Reno 911 skits, and I didn't find them anywhere besides Quibi. I was ready to pay and I tried to find an option to watch Quibi content on my desktop, but it seemed like there wasn't any. Only mobile. Yeah, go ahead and dictate to users the exact manner in which they must interact with your product. Don't allow any alternatives. This is what happens.
Edit: well, someone else said it more succinctly:
This argument would have to ignore the massive success of TikTok during the pandemic.
$1B is goddam lot of money to spend on something with $0 capex.
The mobile app is a tiny cost.
So you have paying for the content then distribution. The later should have been royalty based and also drive most of the distribution.
It almost smells fishy.
Do you realise people used to consume a lot of media on their phones vertically... but now they don't... for obvious reaons.
That can't be that hard to understand? Market changed. Previously valid opportunity vanished. They didn't do anything wrong but be around at the wrong time.
A 10 minute Quibi episode is already half the length of a standard sitcom with ads (20 mins). It's not meant to be skippable. There really wasn't a need to make it portrait mode.
Because all other viewing scenarios still exist even with the pandemic.
Vertical video means you just put the phone the same way it always is, and everyone can see everything from floor to ceiling.
And No, what you say is not how any of the video services work. Pandemic or not, the largest selection of videos are 16:9.
Quibi bet the house on a mobile-only portrait videos In 10 minute chapters. You claim there was a market for that - but give no evidence.
There isn’t a broad market for that niche offering!
"Don't be hapless" is good advice, and at least one thing that Quibi did wrong is not follow that.
Look at how much grief Hulu got from users for being "paid but still with ads" for so long before at least adding the option to remove the ads, and then question how smart these other companies who think "paid but still with ads" is a great plan. Sure, you can get users with that model, but you do it if you have content that's compelling enough in spite of it, it doesn't help.
Saying that the pandemic has stopped people using their phones for this purpose is excuse-making bullshit.
Well, Netflix did that for a long time, too. Last time I tried to watch Netflix on Linux it was still impossible (supposedly you can do it now, but I haven't tried in a few years). Restricting modes of access isn't necessarily a death knell.
Criterion Channel doesn't work on linux though, which I realized only after buying their product and watching a few movies on my Mac. Had I known it I would never have bought since I spend 90% of my time on linux.
Quibi’s decision really does not make sense. It is reasonably cheap to release a viewer app or website for the mainstream browsers & OSes, and indeed if there is a good Quibi show then offering it on desktops & TVs would significantly improve the viewing experience and bring more people in.
The difference is the market share for Linux. It wasn’t that important. Restricting a paid video service, especially where the content are professionally produced, to mobile devices, and where you can’t use the excuse that it’s a social media platform, sounds like suicide.
Apple?
In fact I generally prefer Telegram to Apple Messages.
iMessage shows up occasionally while forming initial connections, but I tend to move the conversation to one of these other services as soon as possible and the other party is almost always OK with that. (I do this in part because I don't regularly use my Mac and these other programs have web versions that can be used on all platforms including Windows PC.)
If you're curious about demographics I'm in my mid 30s. My particular social group is not big into Facebook or Facebook Messenger (though I know they own WhatsApp) since we are techies and privacy-conscious. I'd rather have a 1on1 or small group chat than blast thoughts out into the ether when in that mode of communication. (Hacker News is different. It's cultivated, moderated, and oriented around exploring curiosity.)
My personal pet theory is that it depends on when the country got free text messages. For example in Sweden everyone already had unlimited texts before smartphones were ubiquitous, therefore WhatsApp never really had a purpose and Messenger became the supplementary app.
[0]: https://www.similarweb.com/corp/blog/popular-messaging-apps-... (Not sure about the source but the countries I know are reflected correctly.)
Asia is LINE/WeChat. Very few use either FB or Whatsapp.
This is...not true. Line has Japan and Thailand, WeChat has China and the mainland diaspora, and the rest is mostly dominated by Messenger, WhatsApp, or a local app (e.g. Zalo in Vietnam or KakaoTalk in South Korea).
Source: me, a person who has lived in Asia for a long time, and the bulging folder of messaging apps on my phone.
If paid subscriptions failed to fill the ads hole, the yes, the pandemic would be bad for business.
That's on top of competing against Google, Facebook, and established broadcast/cable advertising markets, with likely unestablished or unattractive demographics.
From TFA.
tiktok has more viral hits per day than quibi generated in its whole lifetime
tiktok is expert at recommendation, quibi doesn't have enough content to have a recommender
quibi doesn't have anything share-driven
and that right there is why quibi failed - the only quibi clip I've seen was taken by someone using another phone to record it and post it to twitter. By not allowing viral hits to be easily shared on any platform they shot themselves in the foot.
Seems like such an obvious miss.
Youtube and netflix aren't the same thing either. One has to pay for hosting costs, the other has to pay for hosting AND sourcing/production costs.
(*I am simplifying here. I am aware Youtube is more than that)
There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books
Katzenberg claimed that "gosh, you just can't make money on a short-form video content service right now, there's covid and the lingering effects of 9/11 blah blah blah."
Oops, major counterexample: Tik-Tok. YouTube. Instagram/FB stories.
Dubious defense: "Oh, those aren't remotely comparable, because they paid less for their content. Obviously, the world turns upside down and the two become incomparable once you fill that service with content you paid too much for. You can't go with the much simpler explanation that we were just much worse at finding content people would be willing to view at a price sufficient to cover our costs."
>There is a difference between being a librarian who sells 1000 books and being a librarian AND author who sells AND writes 1000 books
Okay, if you want to go that route, the analogy would be:
Pointy-haired boss: "I'm going to make a fortune creating and hosting books."
PHB: <fails>
PHB: "Well, gosh, you know, people just aren't really reading that kind of content now, so of course it's going to be unprofitable."
Creators: "What? We make plenty providing content."
Bookstores and conventional libraries: "What? We make plenty of money buying and hosting content."
PHB: "No, you can't compare that, because I try to do both!"
Quibi is just the same, except that you can also add:
YouTube/TikTok: "Huh? We make money hosting free content where we share a cut of the advertising with the providers."
At what point do you say, "No, dude, the market is there, you're just bad at it"?
sigh
Who thought that would be a good idea.
Meg Whitman has had a legendary career, but even she doesn't appear to have experience founding a tech company. She started at P&G and then went to eBay when it had 30 employees and $4M in revenue[0]. And the founder came from Hollywood, neither of them had real founder experience.
I would love to read an insiders account of what happened between the company's formation in August 2018 to April 2020, when the product launched. It looks like they got tons of media deals lined up before the app launched, I wonder how much product development and discovery they were doing during that time.
she drove HP into the ground, to the point wear Bloomberg named her the most underachieving ceo
at ebay she purchased skype for 4 billion then turned around and sold it for 2.
But thanks for sharing, I guess?
I don't work with any. I exclusively work on early-stage startups, so all my companies have teams of 3-20. They're also mostly bootstrapped.
I've tried partnering with ex-consultants in the past, but they add no value. They don't have deep industry contacts to sell to. They don't have hands-on experience actually building anything. They make nice PowerPoint presentations, and that's literally it. They constantly over-promise and under-deliver.
They also often demand high salaries at early stages, because they're used to making $300-500k, but that's a whole other issue.
I wasn't being trite. I consider having management consulting (especially MBB) to be a negative on a resume of someone I'm considering working with. It's essentially a disqualifying issue for me after many bad experiences. Maybe the next person is the exception, but it's not worth the risk for me anymore.
Being in leadership is even worse, because you're complicit in destroying so much shareholder value. You charge $100M for something that delivers no real value and costs your firm $10M. Why is that something we should admire?
> Some of them suck, some of them are mediocre, some of them are spectacularly good.
What are they spectacularly good at, though?
I completely agree that many of them are brilliant, but what skills are they honing, exactly? Brilliance by itself is not enough to make me want to work with someone. Experience is much more useful.
The experience gained tt consulting firms seems to be sales (of a very specific type), making beautiful presentations, and bending data to fit whatever narrative people want it to. Maybe they do some legwork gathering data or running some regressions, but they're usually starting with a preconception of where they should end up.
I have a friend who's a partner at Accenture, and he feels exactly the same way about management consulting that I do: it's bullshit. Another friend at McKinsey described his analyst job as "knowing how to wear a suit and be on time".
I've heard of so many disasters caused by management consultancies. Where are the success stories? At best, they just give a company's managers some data that validates what the company already wants to do, but maybe it's a little too risky.
Somewhere in the middle, perhaps they find a way to sneakily kill a pension program or fire 10,000 people. They're creating value for the company, but it's not exactly work your family will write about in your obituary.
At worst, they burn through piles of cash and accomplish absolutely nothing.
Often MBB consultants are brought in with privileged permissions too - they get access to data, meetings and personnel that internal staff don’t get access to, and the end result is a fancy PowerPoint with a few well-spaced bulletpoints about simplification, efficiencies and renewed cost cutting. Hardly rocket science.
Further, their tendency to use the latest hype (big data! blockchain! data is the new oil! machine learning! etc) in their consultative sales model often shows their hand. They read the same stuff as everyone else, they just went to a fancy university and as you note ‘know how to wear a suit’.
Then once the PowerPoint has been presented, they go off into the wilderness after cashing their checks, or appear at another part of the company working on an unaffiliated project purely based on their connections and brown-nosing.
Has any research been done on the efficicacy of decisions that MBB consultants make in corporates? What empirical evidence is there that these consultants actually deliver value over the medium and long terms in relation to a placebo (ie the current management of a company)?
I don’t doubt they are generally intelligent and well-read, but so are a lot of internal staff and non-consultants.
Update: added last sentence, fixed some spelling errors.
You just listed the standard elitist silver spoon CV. She had a stellar career because she was born into it. Her track record at all of these institutions speaks to her actual talent.
Meritocracy, my ass.
https://techspective.net/2020/08/07/meg-whitman-and-predicti...
In fact, under your philosophy, how could one be successful at all and not have you scoff at their success? Does the person have to literally go from rags to riches?
I do not deny that each step in her journey made it easier to take the next step. They made it easier because they were necessary. They are also hard work and long hours. It’s not a life I would volunteer for.
Now, if you want to talk about folks plopped into plumb positions by family members of powerful politicians, cough Hunter Biden, cough Jared Kushner, then you can talk about silver spoon elitism all you want.
Sure, she was good at working the system that her elite upbringing put her on track for. Among the managerial caste, she was unusually good at ladder-climbing. And she was certainly lucky to join a dot-com success story at the right moment. But being good at managerialist skills and selling one's self aren't all that it takes to succeed at business. Indeed, that can be a real handicap, because being good at working other Harvard MBAs doesn't mean a thing when it comes to pleasing people you want to pay $4.99 a month.
Speaking of, what managerial caste are you talking about? Your use of that term insults people living under an actual caste system.
Whitman's success to failure ratio is astonishing and that failure tends not to be attributed to the prestigious education...oddly.
Only wierd part of this is the comment of how "children dream of"
So if one is playing to maximize cash, the optimal strategy is to be very good at bullshit, self-promotion, and generating impressive short-term metrics without regard to long-term impact. You have to look good, and then you have to avoid the long-term consequences of your choices. Then when you get to the top, it's even more important to juke the stats so that executive compensation is maximized. Because by then you're standing on top of a pyramid of bullshitters with little devotion to the workers or the customers.
Bain Capital, the PE raider made (in)famous thanks to the 2012 Mitt Romney campaign? Sounds more like everything she touched turned to shit.
otherwise all you’re saying from the get go is she had her foot in the right doors and was able to get good jobs at P&G and Bain. Do you think she truly earned the jobs or was truly the best candidate for those jobs out of everyone? Her eBay tenure is not destroying the company, but instead letting it do its own thing without actually doing anything else. You can see the results for yourself over the past decade.
You’re right most people can only dream of such things because dreams usually contain thinking about luck, lucky breaks, winning capitalism, though not necessarily out of skill and talent.
Your comment is emblematic how how inefficient our oligarchical system is. It's like saying someone would be a good general because his father is an important feudal lord. That's the way it was throughout the vast majority of history, but we pretend it is different now.
But technically Steve Jobs did work for HP once... he had a summer job at HP at age 12, which he landed after calling Bill Hewlett asking for some spare parts to build a frequency counter.
I don't think either approach is necessarily 'wrong' either, because I've seen tons of companies have great success with staggering numbers of thoroughly mediocre devs and lots of turnover. But you very likely have to commit to one strategy or the other, the absolute shittest places I've worked are the ones where they're kidding themselves, unsure what they're trying to do, or half way through a transition from one approach to the other.
As dumb and unintuitive as it sounds, I think you can run a big bank very successfully with 200 engineers siloed into small teams of experts, or with 3000 engineers shoveled into big "tribes" (or whatever the buzzword of the day is) of distributed responsibility. But I'm wary of anyone that's trying to do it with 800 engineers, especially the "we only hire the best!" variety. (those three numbers obviously scale with the size of the business and a bunch of external factors).
He would put aside time to identify and heavily recruit engineers he thought were talented.
Scott Forstall has a story about how Jobs was basically afraid that he (Forstall) would be put off by the rest of the HR process and pulled him out and told him he's getting hired and to just go through the motions.
Cabel Sasser from Panic has a story about how Jobs and Schiller tried to recruit Panic to work at Apple.
Bill Atkinson also has a story about Jobs spending a day pitching to him to join the Apple engineering team.
"Mobile only" is a self imposed limitation, so that's on Katzenberg and everyone else who had influence on that decision.
(ETA: Oh and I just remembered that Fox, the crazy Australian company not the parts of Disney formerly known as Fox, and its subsidiary Bento Box do have a full Bob's Burgers feature film release on their schedule. Not that it entirely compares to the prestige of a classic DFA fairy tale based film, but there's at least one attempt at a 2D animated feature film in the near future.)
At HP, market cap also grew significantly on her watch.
I feel like implying that she is a failure is almost borderline sexist.
It's impossible to determine this what-if scenario though, so I agree it's best to leave out the speculation.
What are you talking about, CEOs get criticism all the time. Especially on HN where people are aggressive about their opinions. Just because you can't do alternate reality simulation doesn't mean you can't say anything about this.
GP then suggested we could claim something, and I pointed out the requirements for that, thus putting the onus on them for making the suggestion we could.
Also, even if it was, there's actually no one criticizing Jobs in the 12 search hits in the thread, but comparing him favorably. So an unfortunate anecdote at that.
Remember this headline from 2017
"Meg Whitman leaves behind a fractured Hewlett-Packard with no guarantees"
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.marketwatch.com/amp/story/m...
Things were not rosy at hp.
Also she bought Skype, but forgot to check that the IP was actually included in the purchase.
I am honestly astonished she is seen in an even minimally positive light these days.
It is especially interesting in the context of quibi because it appears that most of their content deals allowed the content creators to own the underlying content but require a 2 year exclusive license to the service.
Quibi was a disaster and Whitman was probably the wrong person to lead it — and Katzenberg the wrong person to lead the creative — but to suggest Jeffrey Katzenberg doesn’t have real founder experience is just wrong. He was a founder of what was then known as DreamWorks SKG (he’s the K) and its DreamWorks Animation division. DreamWorks was the most audacious studio since United Artists, and although DreamWorks Pictures ultimately failed, DreamWorks Animation lives on even now. But regardless, to say that he doesn’t have founded experience is flat wrong. He co-founded one of the most high-profile media companies of the last thirty years.
Quibi was a disaster and we can all have a good laugh at how much it missed the mark but Katzenberg is a founder — and I would argue a damn good one — and one of the most successful producers in Hollywood history.
Yes, he did well with dreamworks animation but that was much more a Hollywood studio focused on content than a technology product. It just happened to require a lot of good tech.
He’s a creative producer of long form content with a ton of Hollywood cachet that is the opposite of what upstart mobile video is today.
The other letters in SKG, Spielberg and Geffen seem to know better than to wade into tech.
Only time software or app appears on their Wikipedia entries is a 1989 collaboration and an article about Geffen blocking public beach access.
I get why a mogul like Katzenberg would want to try at the app game, others have before him. But I am not surprised he’d fail to be successful with this company.
If anyone is interested in learning about Katzenberg and some of the insane power politics from his time at Disney, I recommend The Operator: David Geffen Builds, Buys, and Sells the New Hollywood.
I am not seeing the distinction, personally, I'd love some more input on this. The tech they built was their moat, from my understanding, and one of the reasons they could deliver on their creative vision in a way that few other companies did?
Dreamworks had large Babe Ruth level swings and to some extent got very lucky with chance.
Mike Meyers was not the original voice of Shrek. It was Chris Farley, who played an entirely different character. Farley died and much of the film had to be redone. While Farley was a star, he wasn’t well and there’s no telling the movie would have been a hit like it was under Meyers. Without the early success of Shrek a moat would have been over-engineering.
Quibi looked like they thought it would operate under similar forces, runaway successful content made cheaply.
When in fact the medium of delivery and matching algorithms are more powerful than smash content. Worrying about and being good at the former is just not like what Dreamworks did.
I think the founding theory behind Quibi was that is wasn't supposed to be a tech startup. It was a media/content start up. We largely consider Netflix a tech startup, but their technology has two main areas: distribution and recommendations. The rest of their business (and likely the larger fraction) is in content production and procurement.
Quibi wasn't supposed to be a tech startup, it was all about the content. This was their primary expertise and focus. Their main differentiating factor was that they were creating content for mobile consumption.
It may well be that the rapid changes in media consumption due to Covid had a major part of their downfall. That and TikTok. It's hard to compete against free, mobile-first, viral content.
Building and distributing apps is, however, not a consistently repeatable solved problem. Unlike movies, scale, budget, stars, and connections don't dramatically increase your chances of success... even if the content is great.
So no, I don't think Katzenberg has the type of "founder" experience that would naturally give him an advantage in learning how to understand a market that he has no experience with.
Tangentially, I was just looking at Dreamworks' filmography, and it's VERY impressive. My mind is specifically blown, though, that Steven Spielberg released Minority Report and Catch Me If You Can six months apart in the same year. That is... pretty incredible.
Spielberg only stepped in to direct after Gore Verbinski dropped out because the film was delayed due to DiCaprio working on Gangs of New York. Verbinski's original casting had James Gandolfini as Hanratty and Ed Harris as Frank Sr. Verbinski ended up doing The Ring instead. Its amazing how much of Hollywood production is a string of almosts and conflicting schedules.
Meg Whitman was lucky enough to ride the eBay rocket at the right moment. Everything she touched after that, went wrong.
Her record breaking campaign, HPQ, and Quibi are all negatives.
If she had at least one for sure success, that’d be one thing.
So flying directly in the face of that and assuming you could carve out a niche based on a "time of day"/"behavior" thing alone seems very daring, especially when you're still spending an unimaginable amount of $$ on content that you'll need to pay back soon.
The swing and a miss on the consumption model crippled the ability of the content to stand on its own and give them any other chance...
Sorry that seems to be the most pointless niche I think someone tried to focus on
I actually wanted to watch the Reno 911 stuff and the Ron Funches show.... on my TV, where I watch stuff.
They played stupid games and didn't win any prizes.
Why not? Esp. when everybody's at home!? This sounds ridiculous.
Let's be honest, "being at home" is not the reason it failed.
There's a huge difference between "we [originally] wanted to target market segment X" vs "we will turn down easy money from market segment Y", and Quibi was doing the latter, which is not defensible. That's especially bad when X vanishes and Y increases. (Here, X = people watching on phones, Y = people watching at home.)
To be "not interested" in Y is to be not interested in money.
Now, to pre-empt an obvious reply: yes, sometimes you do want to turn down easy money from a segment Y. But that's primarily when you're promoting a niche luxury product, where usage by Y will hurt your branding long-term. It's not applicable to a product that deliberately attempts (and needs) to be mass-market, especially when it's targeting transit users and people who have to idly wait.
They failed because their content was terrible, they just aren't admitting it.
I signed up to watch it. It just wasn't the same as the good old show I used to watch, so I unsubscribed.
I flipped through page after page after page of their other content offerings and not a single other thing looked remotely interesting to me. I tried watching a couple just because, and I got bored fast.
In a pandemic, I think people would prefer longer form of content.
I had a similar experience recently when my phone broke and many services wouldn't work on my older phone, or older iPad, even in the browser. The worst offender was HBO Max which also flat out refuses to run on linux. I had to cancel it because I'm not going to buy a streaming service to exclusively use on my work laptop.
Does anyone remember when we made websites with the goal of as many people using them as possible? streaming video has been mainstream for over a decade, yet everyone still fucks it up.
I realize that a company CEO doesn't need to be a subject matter expert, but when you're building a platform focused on millennials (mobile-first), it would help to have someone that can identify with the target audience.
edit: And co-founder Katzenberg has his "emails printed out (and vertically folded, for some reason) by assistant" [2]
[1] https://theweek.com/speedreads/923863/quibi-ceo-admits-not-r...
[2] https://www.vulture.com/2020/07/is-anyone-watching-quibi.htm...
They thought millennials wanted "shorter" based on the success of tiktok/instagram/etc. But their content was too long to be short. And the "golden age of TV" we are in basically proves that people don't really want shorter in scripted content. If anything, we want deeper stories. Novellas have never outsold novels. Movies were an outlier for a while, based on the fact it was so hard to produce content, but even movies are now becoming trilogy's+. Youtube is hugely successful because it satisfies niche content, the length is irrelevant.
They thought it should be "mobile", but by limiting it to mobile they meant that you could only watch part of the time. Netflix is perfectly fine on mobile.
The switching back and forth thing feels like a novelty like 1 time then you just do whatever you want and stick with that. Its also hard for creators as you don't know how people will use it, so you have to make it "worse in landscape" and "worse in portrait" so people can watch on either method.
I absolutely LOVE people taking big risks on ideas. This was just a bad idea from the start. I wish they would have blown $1.8B on some shoot the moon healthcare idea or something.
Totally right, imo. I might be old and out of touch, but to me 10 minutes is way too long for content on mobile, and short enough to be kind of annoying on anything else. I'd rather watch a 25 or 30 minute show if I want something short on TV.
A more interesting, much smaller risk would've been something like a sketch comedy show where every clip is under a minute (Tiktok style). Yeah a ton of amateurs are already doing stuff like that, but - hire them!
Interesting.
She's not so good at taking something that is new or failing and making it good. She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined. She ran HPE into the ground because it was already failing.
She didn't succeed with Quibi because she doesn't know about how to find market fit.
As far as brilliant, I'm referring to raw intelligence. You could tell her new information and she would instantly digest it and apply that to new areas. Also, if you were in a meeting with her once, she'd remember you and what you talked about. If you mentioned that you had kids for example, the next time she saw you months later she'd ask how your kids are, for example.
If you can only do well in a company that already has a bright future ahead of it (with or without you), are you a good CEO?
Is finding and maintaining P/M fit not the primary role of a CEO?
The good CEOs I've worked under, had a clear vision for the company and were good at selling that vision both to investors (private and public/stock market) and to the rank and file during monthly or quarterly all-hands. Did she do that?
But she was good at setting a vision, expressing that vision, and making sure it was being followed and getting her direct reports to move things in the direction she wanted.
As far as brilliant, I'm referring to raw intelligence. You could tell her new information and she would instantly digest it and apply that to new areas. Also, if you were in a meeting with her once, she'd remember you and what you talked about. If you mentioned that you had kids for example, the next time she saw you months later she'd ask how your kids are, for example.
Bit of a leap to conclude that right just based on eBay?
eBay would've had astronomical growth under a dog as CEO. As you mentioned:
> She definitely made eBay much bigger than it would have been without her, but it was already successful and growing when she joined.
And that's her one success story. She's had plenty of other opportunities to demonstrate management competency. I think there's a cognitive fallacy where we assume someone is good because they were there and we lived through things with them.
But as others have said, just look at her wikipedia:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meg_Whitman
I think we should challenge ourselves when defending people just because they were there and they didn't fail.
I don't care how brilliant she was at delegating to managers across categories, etc., the world needs space for better leaders than e.g. those who support Prop 8 (were anti-gay marriage) etc. Like if you don't have empathy there, then it's unlikely you're going to be a better manager than, again, my dog.
A manager needs to be a leader. Perhaps she can delegate and she has an MBA from HBS and she's well-connected in Silicon Valley (I remember her connections to Scott Cook at Intuit, etc. - so much bad shit happened under their watch though, poaching, etc.).
But I don't think any of her behavior (unless you have concrete examples) makes her "brilliant" or a "good manager" - unless the standards are pretty out-of-date. We really should not be defending people who don't evolve (and who are financially very taken care of and have every opportunity to earn trust again, but don't).
UPDATE. I see some examples now in the other comments. Personally I'm not convinced. But that's just me.
> ...much bad shit happened under their watch though, poaching, etc.
If empathy is important to you, please consider not using the term "poaching". Employees are not animals that belong to an employer based on an imaginary hereditary right. They have the choice (and often exercise it) of employment at a new place based on the relative attractiveness of both opportunities.
But I'm saying she does at least have some wins on her track record to justify hiring her.
I mean the good news is it seems like management has gotten better across the board (nobody talked about empathy even ten years ago). So that’s good.
Someone in our company slack posted this re: Katzenberg too: https://collider.com/jeffrey-katzenberg-disney-renaissance-i...
It’s just interesting how our former leaders might be seen in new light (but yeah not to take away from the solid wins they did have and I think it’s awesome she remembered people’s names and details - the average CEO in the generation before would’ve been hard pressed to do that). Perhaps it’s good that the bar gets higher and higher.
And yeah, I don't think any of us want that. It's fascinating though how we (not the OP, but perhaps myself and others) so easily jump on the criticism bandwagon for Marissa Mayer, Ellen Pao or now Meg Whitman. I don't think we do that for male CEOs as much.
Anyway, just noting it for those reading this later. Poor choice in wording in the above (I actually love my dog a lot - but the wording probably comes off as insensitive). Which was not the intention, but a good learning moment for me.
https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-xpm-2013-feb-26-la-me-pc...
I don't think EBay was destined by the gods for greatness. There was zero barrier to entry and they weren't the first. They weren't even the first coming from General Magic where Omidyar had worked. I'm inclined to give her credit for EBay but evidently nothing else.
Meanwhile, every history of Amazon points out how their third-party seller project stole eBay's opportunity by focusing on customers first and building a unified product hierarchy.
eBay managed to hold on by being the first 2-sided marketplace to gain traction, enjoying a huge moat much like CraigsList. Over time, it squandered the opportunity.
Meg may know how to keep a company in operation, but she's never shown she can lead a product from scratch. That's just a giant risk to take with $billions of funding at stake.
1. https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2011/07/ebay-patents-10-cli...
So, effectively, Meg's presence made no different. Doesn't sound like a good or effective CEO.
"Yeah, but she has experience"
What does this even mean?
'How do you do fellow kids?'
Whitman was the 'Business Person'.
That said, the content format is really quite different, and it's hard to predict how '5 minute bits' would work, and they spent possibly way too much money on it, it would have been better to 'start small', to find the format that works, and then spend a fortune - which is probably something that Meg should have understood given her background in the Valley.
My argument against this point is simple: few of those were original content conceived by Katzenberg/DreamWorks/Disney. They were existing stories (most already successful as books). The only things I can see in his filmography that are possibly original and hugely successful are Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Kung Fu Panda, and Madagascar, Road to El Dorado, and _maybe_ Chicken Run.
I think the thing that confuses people is that the true domain for some companies isn't what the end consumer sees. I worked for a car website for a while, and very few of the executives were really car people. But they were all incredible experts on how dealerships worked, and that was actually what our business was, not how cars work.
But for an up and coming company, everybody in the top ranks should be involved and knowledgable of subject at hand
Will be really interesting to see if anyone steps up to buy the content... but from what little I watched it was all pretty rough.
Seems like a lesson learned about raising money to solve something people don't care about... in this case a first-class mobile experience...
Who knows, maybe in 10 years we'll all be like "Quibi was really ahead of it's time"
It's easy to look back and say that. I wouldn't have guessed people cared about temporary video messages, but look at Snap.
Quibi gave you portrait TV shows with low production value with actors trying to cash in on the remainder of their GoT fame.
Nobody's paying for Snap either. The only reason they are (somewhat) alive is because advertisers still think burning money on annoying people is worth it based on inflated or misleading metrics. Once the adtech bubble pops they'll be down the toilet as well.
People do want a first-class mobile experience (see TikTok), they just don't want to pay a premium for it. If you charge people for something, you better make damn sure it's way better than the free alternative.
Biggest issue with Quibi was lack of app for TV. They cut their TAM by only focusing on Mobile. I don’t think YouTube premium would be as popular if it was only for 1 platform.
For Android, the other comment suggests uBlock Origin which I definitely recommend (even for other reasons beyond YouTube).
On phones... sometimes, but that's usually fixed within a day or two.
Before others crucify me for not paying for the content: I'm paying for a subscription service where most of the YouTube channels I follow mirror their content (https://watchnebula.com/). I just cut out Google as an unnecessary middleman.
Also is there anything wrong with offering a paid service which offers removing ads and getting some extra functionality?
If anything YouTube is the most open platform by far, because the vast majority of the content on there is owned by the creators, not YouTube, and thus it could be on other platforms, in a way that will never happen with the paid streaming services. Indeed this is even happening with CuriosityStream.
Ding, ding, ding! The accuracy of this statement is frightening.
I'm annoyed with YT pushing major media orgs' content out because the only reason I watch it is for the smaller creators. But the reality is the ads are annoying.
And it's worth paying for just to be able to listen to the app with the screen turned off. I've also warmed up quite a bit to YT Music even if the UI feels a bit rough around the edges (browser; mobile is OK).
But the ads? Yeah, that's a big reason.
No one wants to pay for something where they're still the product being sold. Youtube Premium still has all its trackers, still recommends videos not that it think you will find interesting but that it thinks will keep you watching (for better or worse), and still feeds all of your data into the Google ads network for companies to target you on other websites.
* 6 phone calls
* 4 voicemails
* 9 emails
all from what looks like companies from third-world countries offering business development services, website designs, app developers, logo design, etc, specifically asking about the new domain I purchased.
:(
Back when it was introduced on Android, it worked on YouTube just fine. Then it was intentially broken (hidden behind a paywall).
E.g.:
> Ancestor: [paraphrased] YouTube makes money by doing extra work to make a free service more painful to use and then charging to remove those annoyances.
> You: [paraphrased] What makes <ancestor> so entitled as to think that you deserve the free service without the annoyances?
> Me: [paraphrased] No, YouTube is definitely intentionally removing features from their free service and offering to add them back if you pay them. That's true whether or not anyone feels entitled to those features.
> You: [paraphrased] Well duh, it's they're right, and why should they offer those features for free in the first place?
You'll have to close the gap on why you think it's bad while still acknowledging that they aren't a charity instead of just leaving your point as an exercise for the reader.
So far it's like complaining that Netflix paywalls the "basic functionality" of being able to watch their videos. Or that a game demo only gives you part of a game when you actually want all of it for free.
No, I don't. Whether or not I think that's bad is entirely orthogonal to what I actually said.
Background video lowers the value of ads which subsidizes free playback so it makes monetary sense to disable it. It's also a trivial amount of work done once.
On the other hand, video is expensive to serve so the ad revenue per gigabyte should be higher, in addition to getting more hours of listening per user. So it makes monetary sense to enable it.
They're both valid options for making money. So it's fair game to analyze it as a matter of user preference, company preference, and level of rudeness.
Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0. Advertisers are paying for impressions and views, not sound only.
Youtube has separate audio and video streams available on almost everything. I'd be very surprised if it wasted that data, and a quick search suggests it doesn't waste that data.
> Even if they did, the ad revenue without video playback is 0.
Sounds like they're doing something wrong in the sales process.
You're vastly underestimating how 10s of billions of dollars in advertising transactions are conducted. It's far more involved than just a "sales process".
If you don’t deliver what the advertiser paid for then you can’t charge for the ad.
Changing the format for audio ads that would run in the limited scenario of background video involves way too much effort and tooling to make it worth it.
I can't even read Washington Post and New York Times articles without paying for a subscription. So what? They don't owe anything to me for free. Thus I have paid subscriptions with them, because I value their content enough to pay for it and that's the only compensation methodology they've found to be workable.
It generally doesn't even work in other media. CD sales were built on the back of free radio broadcasts. Pay cable and satellite subscriptions targeted an audience already exposed to television through free TV broadcasts. You have to offer a fundamentally better experience, on the order of "this new thing is the only way to experience non-live music" for people to pay for it sight-unseen.
> Nobody pays for Youtube Premium because they want the exclusive content. They pay because they hate ads and Youtube gatekeeps basic app functionality behind the paywall. It's not a service it's a hostage negotiation.
To which my response was that it's a commonly accepted business practice to create free and premium tiers (it's so common it even has a name: "freemium"), and that this doesn't remotely constitute "gatekeeping" or "hostage negotiation". And it is common for companies to switch models over time, starting out with free in order to spur quick growth and then figuring out monetization later. Make no mistake, YouTube was originally losing catastrophic amounts of money, and what has happened to it is the only path that was even viable. You either need a lot of advertising or a substantial paid subscriber base in order to not suffer huge ongoing losses and be forced to shutter. Just ask every newspaper ever.
I just don't see what YouTube has uniquely done differently vs any other company that has a paid tier or that has grown over time and needed to find additional ways to make money because it turns out that you can't turn around a loss by scaling it.
I don't live advertising either. But I accept that it pays for the vast majority of the content that I consume online.
"Premium" doesn't mean "fancy" or "hard to implement", it just means "We aren't making money giving this away for free, so you have to pay for it".
And someone with the screen off is using far less bandwidth. I doubt it's hard to make money off them, even with reduced ad revenue.
Then they should not advertise it as such. I have not looked at youtube ads for a while, but earlier it was definitely advertising "host your videos free, let your friends watch them free from anywhere in the world, yada yada".
If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
> They could lock the entire site behind a paywall to paid subscribers only tomorrow
Sure they can. But that would likely drive most customers away and be a very bad business decision. My 2c.
> If one advertises "absolutely free email hosting" but means "we will read your email, analyze your behavior and sell your information to those who can effectively hound you with ads", people should push back. And "it isn't free to run" is not a valid defense.
Show me a single freemium service anywhere that advertises itself using such exaggerated language.
I don't understand why people complain about free services like this. You can't eat your cake and have it too. Choose if you want the ad-supported free service or the paid service and then quit complaining about the choice you've made. You're not ever gonna get an ad-free free service that offers all the same features as the paid service. That would be corporate malpractice of the highest order; they'd have $0 revenue!
Nobody has suggested otherwise, so why do you keep hammering on this point?
> I don't understand why people complain about free services like this.
Free services are not immune to criticism.
If someone is suggesting an unrealistic business model, that's one thing. If they just say a feature is bad, there's no need to argue with them. They are not obligated to "quit complaining"!
It seems you're unaware of what marketing actually is and are just personally against ads yourself. That's fine, but it doesn't mean there are any absolutes.
I think most of the downsides would be in second-order effects (like the paywall bit you pointed out) and in effective enforcement (advertising dollars might just shift to realistic-looking review sites for example). I'm hopeful that free content would still be produced, especially given that for my own personal use I've noticed that ads correlate negatively with quality, and with a few exceptions like academic publishing all the best content is free and without ads even in today's world where it's easy to ad ads to a site.
It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
Slightly stronger still -- all advertising would be made illegal unless the user explicitly sought it out (e.g. searching for things to buy on Amazon, searching for product recommendations, etc....).
> It's an interesting idea, but I don't see how it'd be compatible with e.g. the first amendment (especially the unfortunate recent ruling in Citizens United).
It might not be legally feasible. I know there are places (in the US, since we're invoking the first amendment) which ban billboards, ban specific kinds of ads (e.g. excessively misleading), ban certain ad-location pairings (e.g. no cigarettes targeting children), and so on, so I'm not totally convinced a motivated party couldn't push it through, but that's not my area of expertise.
> And I'm curious as to what exactly your system would look like in regards to such currently ad-supported services as Google Maps, Gmail, Snapchat, Facebook, Instagram, etc. Would your expectation be that most of these would have to become subscription or pay-per-use services with no free tier? Because I don't see any world in which all of the free services would continue to exist as-is without any ability to monetize themselves through advertising revenue.
Haha, that system doesn't define how those services would work at all -- the idea is that from some kind of first principle (the hypothetical assertion is that push-based ads offer little societal value and large detriments above and beyond the effects of pull-based ads, so they're worth removing) we decide that push-based ads ought to be removed, and any second-order consequences are justified as a response. That's definitely the point I'd attack if I wanted to shoot this idea down, because even with seemingly clear-cut behaviors like killing people we still have to carve out exceptions in the law for all the unforeseen consequences of simply making killing illegal.
I hesitate to speculate too far as to how the market might react if such a law were enacted (and not easily circumvented), but some possible options include:
1. Some of those services (e.g., Snapchat seems vulnerable to that change) would cease to exist, and the companies involved would die or regroup around their other offerings. Not all products are viable in all market conditions.
2. Some others would probably be largely unaffected. Google might double down on "shopping" and other kinds of searches that are legally classified as pull-based and still offer a breadth of services to collect data on you (to offer better results for when you do make pull-based ad queries) and to keep you trapped in their ecosystem so that you can't go to a competitor. Their fee structure for results in those subsystems might change drastically.
3. Some businesses that have an ad-supported free tier _might_ keep that free tier as a way to entice users into paid offerings. E.g., YouTube would drop their ads due to the legal requirement but potentially also limit some other product features to try to convert more people to premium, above and beyond the pay-walling they already do.
4. Many smaller free services already only exist as a charity, a hobby, or some other kind of not-my-primary-source-of-income venture. At first glance I don't think those would be much affected, but if free tiers in AWS and GCP or github actions or whatnot are reduced then that could have downstream consequences.
5. If push-based advertising were banned cold-turkey then it's not totally implausible that we'd finally get mass acceptance around some workable micropayment solution. That _might_ even be integrated with a credit system from some pull-based ad behemoth.
6. Those services might well convert to subscription or pay-per-use. That's prohibitive now in many scenarios because somebody will produce an ad-based competitor, but if that's illegal then you only have to worry about competitors who are actually producing services for free somehow, not those who are producing services for <wink> "free" <wink>. If enough people actually want to produce free services then the ability to monetize goes away, but the need to monetize also goes away since the whole argument about monetization is that we need it to entice people to create stuff. Otherwise, there's still a monetization opportunity, and we can actually charge for the services we build.
And so on. It's really hard to speculate as to what might happen because we're talking about disrupting a $200B-$300B/yr industry. That'll have a sizable impact and quite a few ripples as we reach a new equilibrium.
And, interestingly, the biggest exodus I've seen hasn't been to another free platform, it's been to a subscription-only platform (CuriosityStream). The documentary-style YouTubers didn't think they were making enough money on YouTube because of how hard it is to make their content vs your typical vlogging stuff, and they know their viewers are willing to pay more to access it, so they made a pay-only streaming site to earn more money from their product.
But I'd say 90% of my youtube consumption is on TV.
People just care much more about content than the experience unless it’s really really terrible and even then in the case of shows and movies content comes first.
15 min episodes with lackluster content that are essentially only good for your short commute run isn’t and likely never will be what people are looking for.
I honestly didn’t even knew Quibi existed until this year or maybe late 2019 when they had a huge marketing push for their exclusive shows and those shows sucked. You got a disjointed experience akin to a hallmark movie split into short episodes.
We already tried that with “webisodes” in the past and they didn’t survive once streaming became a thing because they couldn’t match the quality of the content of Netflix and co.
Quibi failed because people don’t mind pausing and the few that do probably would rather watch a 20-30min episode of their favorite sitcoms during commute than 1 or 2 episodes of some Quibi show.
The format especially the portrait mode content was also annoying as fuck, this isn’t instagram.
You didn't know of it earlier because it was founded in 2018 with a product launch in 2020.
Uhh..so? It didn't even launch until April 2020.
It kinda reminded me of the webisodes that were popping out everywhere in the mid 2000’s to early 2010’s. They poured a lot of money into recognizable but still affordable actors but the content was just boring.
I'm somewhat baffled by the "if we just raise a bunch more money to produce way more expensive content it'll work this time" logic, but if you're a Hollywood person I think it's probably easy to believe that more grassroots/independent youtube-creator productions wouldn't be able to compete with your A-Listers.
From what I've observed, this only happens in two cases:
* Where there was a fan base that loved the product but it just didn't work out.
* Where there was legitimate innovation behind the offering that can't be fully realized.
I don't think Quibi hits either of these points. There might be other signals I haven't thought through, but these are the 2 main ones I've been able to piece together for when people attribute a company being "ahead of its time".
I would be surprised if anyone does. The reason why Quibi was able to get so many creators onboard is twofold. The first reason is they had a lot of money to spend. The second reason is that the deals they signed were very friendly to creators. Quibi got two years of exclusivity with the content, but they didn't own it outright. The creators could reedit the shows into more traditional formats and resell it after two years or even just give it away for free on Youtube and make whatever they can in ad revenue. So while the content will likely resurface eventually, I can't imagine many big players will want to pick up Quibi's side of those original deals.
The amount they raised is reasonable if the goal is to create a few flagship shows and dozens of less-expensive ones. They went for A+ film/TV talent and actually managed to close deals with some of them.
Quibi shutting down is met with a resounding lol from every demographic on the planet the end
1) Their hypothesis that short form content was desirable was deeply flawed, and I think based on an assumption that online attention spans are short. This is not true with film and TV where the trend has gone over to binge watching very long form content e.g. Vikings, House of Cards, etc.
2) There was no way to watch their content on a big screen. So that introduced another assumption - that no large market segment would want to consume their content on a bigger screen. We actually tried to watch it on Amazon Fire and the hack is horrible.
3) They decided they wanted to attract a number of A list directors and other talent and blew not only a lot of budget on that, but they also wrote their terms so that after two years they lose exclusivity and after 7 years the content reverts back to the creator. This is insane, if you consider the investment and long term value around the films and series that Prime, Netflix and Disney create. The direct effect of this was that there was no business to sell when they decided to shop the company.
4) Quibi suspended releasing new content during the recent protests, while continuing to burn investment cash. They should have adapted to the times. Even post 9/11 certain films were put on hold, but those were films insensitive to current events. I can't imagine all their content fell into that category.
They still have $850 million in cash and have decided to call it. Sounds like Whitman and Katzenberg actually have a good shot at recouping some of their $10.5 and $5.5MM investment respectively. Which leads me to wonder whether they had that money to burn in the first place. Doesn't exactly feel like a "failure isn't an option" approach - and with that cash still in the bank they could take all their learnings from the initial launch and do a hard pivot. Although the business model may be so fundamentally flawed, for the reasons I've described above, that a pivot isn't even feasible.
All things being equal, I wonder what the content is really worth, that stuff typically doesn't age well so not maintaining the ownership may not have been a bad thing and it sounds like they recognized that it wasn't going to catch fire and so shutting it down makes sense. I expect the investment community will look upon it favorably. It's easy to criticize and I don't think I'd have ever paid $10 a month for it, but we also live in a world where there is TV streaming to gas pumps. I wonder what people will do when gas stations stop selling gas but it still takes 20minutes to fully charge your electric car...
It's a combination of respect to investors, the drain of working on something that isn't going anywhere, and starting a fresh company (and cap table) if you have something you want to do instead.
Yes, the startup that became Twitter.
Honestly, thank god they didn't. Sure, I think pivots sometimes make sense, but I think they realized at this point that all the money they put in was sunk cost, and they're really nowhere closer to when they started, and in fact it's probably easier to start anew if they even wanted to with a lower cost base. Better to call it quits and save their dough.
I wonder why they didn’t just try to monetize what they have, while they have it, on YouTube. That would at least tell you if the content was better than the platform.
But, it sounds like they gave creators extraordinary control.
A starting investment of that size probably qualifies it for a record in the fat (as distinct from lean) startup size category as well.
It could work if your product met or was at least close to the minimum quality standard of your competitors. From what I've seen and read, Quibi was horribly substandard.
Katzenberg comes from an industry (film studios) for which that is largely the model. They are willing to have some expensive failures ($100MM-scale) if the successes will launch a "franchise" which is subsequently mined.
A failure more than an order of magnitude off what's tolerable in his old industry may be hard to survive, who knows. But industrial filmmaking is a lot like industrial food production: a blend of fear (customers won't adopt the new) and dictating the product to the customer.
that makes sense, and definitely feels like they were building a rocket-sized dart to throw.
it'd be interesting to see the breakdown on how much of that capital went towards engineering the app vs content/other.
The Hollywood model spends most of that money on ppl and marketing, little on tech. K has no tech experience and W only a smidgeon despite her exec jobs (eBay & HP). So I would be shocked if they spent more than $25MM on their stack which is mostly conventional. I’m sure the rest was blown on marketing, high salaries, consultants, offices, and deals with actors.
> I’m sure the rest was blown on marketing, high salaries, consultants, offices, and deals with actors
It sounds like the antithesis of "lean startup". Of course it could have worked out the other way if they had nailed market-fit. It does make me wonder if they could try to salvage the tech and try a slight pivot.
I mean, I'm not sure exactly how much credit to give him, but DreamWorks Animation had a lot of tech and he oversaw it for 20+ years. He stood up a brand new animation studio while the industry was digitizing, which means everyone used in-house tools because off-the-shelf stuff wasn't available. They purchased PDI, had been doing CG since 1980. They maintained a proprietary CG pipeline for decades and integrated multiple locations. This was during a time when the industry went from NURBS to sub-d, from basic direct lighting to global illumination to path-tracing--mostly using software written in-house. Not to mention the larger issues of asset management, data center scaling (power, water, and city requirements) and the staff and budgets to support all of that. At scales only a handful of other facilities were doing CG at, while competing for innovation, scale, and quality.
I'm pretty sure Katzenberg and Whitman courted when she was at HP and they were DreamWorks' "technology partner." They worked together on things like a price-friendly color-accurate LCD monitor and the Halo video conferencing stuff.
I know in the years before DreamWorks was sold to Universal there were Skunk Works projects working on phone apps. I imagine all of that was practice for this. I'm sure most of the money was on content and advertising.
I'm not exactly sure what you mean by not having tech experience, but he definitely oversaw a lot and worked with people who had.
or alternatively twenty thousand 100k research grants in the sciences. Would be pretty great if we could produce some knowledge instead of more mediocre TV shows.
> "Among the backers were most of the major Hollywood studios, Google, Alibaba and the Madrone Capital Partners."
I wonder how much of that $2B was eaten up with "Hollywood Accounting"
Trust me -- this was a bonanza for them. There's never been a greater demand for content than the past couple years, with platforms exploding.
No need to worry about actors or crew being exploited. Happily, the union makes sure of that! (E.g. in contrast to the tech world.)
They are getting minimums, but maybe only minimums.
> "Original, live action dramatic new media productions which are less than 20 minutes in length and made for initial exhibition on a subscription video-on-demand consumer pay platform are not subject to” the tiered breakdowns that help set wage scales “regardless of their budgets."
Another interesting point:
> "While Quibi owns the licensing for its shows for seven years, those terms only apply to the short format. A feature-length edit of each show is also made, and after two years, producers/showrunners/other creative intellectual property holders have the right to sell it to distributors."
Given how much tech pays versus how easy it's to get into tech (ie: compared to becoming a well paying lawyer or doctor) I doubt too many people mind.
[1]: https://mobile.twitter.com/LukeXCunningham/status/1318982719...
With that kind of funding, and given who the founders are, maybe “startup” shouldn’t be used at all? The linked article didn’t use that term, and I mean, a startup that becomes worth $1B is called a “unicorn”, and this venture was launched with more funding than that.
2 billion is chump change for the market they're in. Netflix is spending 15 billion a year on content, Amazon and Apple like 6 billion a piece, and Hulu is around 3.
Cash burn is similar. Netflix is 10s of billions in the hole since they were founded and continues to burn a few billon a year.
- Initially restricting allowed devices to mobile only.
- Flagrant nepotism, like Reese Witherspoon being given $6 million to narrate a documentary miniseries...with her husband coincidentally being the Head of Talent Acquisition at Quibi.
- Seemingly not having a single critically-acclaimed show. Quibi's strategy was seemingly to just dump money on A-list actors, not A-list writers and it made all of the shows (or at least the dozen I sampled) a wasted effort.
- (Allegedly) stealing the video-rotation technology from another company, and being mired in a lawsuit about it.
Also the idea of dropping one episode every week. Imagine being invested in some story and only receiving 8-10 min of it every week. That's twice as short as any TV show out there, not to mention Netflix releasing entire seasons at once.
Also preventing users from taking screenshots, which is just stupid. It just helps if people share your content to other people.
Wow, had no idea about this. Despicable conduct.
> Also preventing users from taking screenshots
Ah yeah, I forgot to mention this point too. Talk about shooting themselves in the foot.
Really, when all these missteps are stacked up, how was anyone thinking that this company wouldn't fail? I know hind sight is 20/20, but these all should have been immediate red flags.
I agree with all your points except this one. Rick and Morty is essentially 20 minute episodes released weekly, after commercials. If you took out long pauses, transitions, and other filling, I'm sure you could get it down to 15 minutes of punch. I'd add a lot of video creators like game of zones, alt-shift-x, theinternethistorian, also fill the punch of 15-25 minute content released weekly/monthly, are ravenously popular.
There is room for ~10-20 minute content but it may be harder to market/monetize.
"Actually, Quibi doesn’t own any of the big-budget premium content for which it has shelled out upwards of $100,000 per minute. The company has seven-year licenses on its short-form series; after two years, content owners have the right to assemble the shows and distribute them elsewhere."
If they don't own the content what they hell did they spend 1.7 billion dollars on?!
https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/quibi-considers-shutti...
They weren't the ones though. They had a lot of investors who swallowed this (flawed) business model whole and decided to bankroll it. The people at Quibi don't have to care and likely got away with a decent chunk of $$$ regardless of the outcome.
Sometimes I wonder if I should actually attempt all the business/project ideas I don't think would ever work. Dress it up with some marketing and a "good" pitch deck and let some suckers bankroll it. Best case scenario I'm a multi-millionnaire, worst case I've still got enough to retire on and it seems like the industry doesn't see these kinds of astronomical failures as a bad thing so I don't even have to sacrifice my career/reputation.
I've never liked any management work Whitman has done, and Katzenberg's primary skill is raising money. How could this have possibly gone right?
I wonder how they made out on it all. they had reasonably good track record prior and likely had a reasonably good cash component, but any equity they had must be wiped.
I feel bad saying this, but I thank Quibi for my lovingly renovated house. No backsies!
Sidenote: There are so many important OSS projects that basically get little to no funding while things like Quibi burn millions if not billions in the dumbest way possible.
Citation needed. Every portfolio I've looked at outside of the top firms has had multiple investments (approved by partners) that to my mind look mind bogglingly dumb. Not Theranos level of dumb, where they'd have to have a little knowledge of blood based diagnostics and the statistical significance of results from finger pricks to know its a fraud, but "we didn't do due diligence and found out that this is a perpetual motion machine/founder doesn't own critical IP/financials don't make sense in any universe" levels of dumb. The former slip through the cracks at even the best firms, but the latter is like watching a slow motion train wreck.
With the benefit of hindsight, the entire industry looks like thousands of monkeys with typewriters (especially when biotech gets frothy).
Then, with the success of Youtube, Tiktok, Instagram pitching a premium short videos app does not sound crazy especially, again, when it's Katzenberg pitching it to you (and he must have invested a good chunk of his own cash).
Then he managed to hire Meg Whitman as CEO and first employee. So now it's Whitman and Katzenberg pitching that idea to you.
It seems seems like some combination of Netflix, YouTube, Snapchat stories, and TikTok that you could throw on a pitch deck and promise investors will be the next version of TV for millennials.
Starting with 100% original programming makes no sense to me. You have 2 billion dollars, license some mega hits to at least bring people in. I downloaded the app and saw exactly what I was expecting - “Create account” or “Sign in”, no way to play anything or see any previews. People aren’t going to try so hard to seek out these shows they haven’t seen or heard of before.
Celebs often let their success go to their head thinking they're the reason why movies they have been in were successful. But the real reason a movie is successful has more to do with directing, writing, editing and all of the background work that was put into it.
Why subscribe to Quibi to see Celebs embarrass themselves with cringe content, when you can see them do that on instagram for free!
One thing I do have to commend Quibi for, however, is how well they reversioned their video content. I think they will be seen as a little ahead of the competition there (possibly before their time). Against other content houses that will have significantly more footage to get through (and/or less resources for this task).
I think the different versions (e.g. portrait/landscape for Quibi) will be a little way off being that common. I expect computer vision tooling will enable it more broadly when it can at least expedite the process considerably (which probably isn't a huge distance off although then the blocker is organisational processes around publishing video).
The portrait / landscape mode should be gamified.
In the former case it's mostly social media, the main value here is memes and/or following creators/influencers; there is never a storyline or a "show" to follow per-se.
Quibi's business model would be that people would not only be interested in a storyline contained within bite-sized chunks of video but that they would actually pay for it. This is a flawed idea; when it comes to a story people want it to go as long as possible (and the pause button is a thing that exists already), there's no reason to want artificially-constrained storylines when you can get the longform equivalent on Netflix for the same price.
It seems there are 3 different types of videos with decreasing segment (or episode) lengths: movies, tv shows, bite-sized shows. Each has its own place for user needs. I think sometimes people don't want to (or don't have time) watch a full movie, so they opt for a tv episode. Similarly, sometimes they don't want to watch a full tv episode.
I never really got how it was ever supposed to work. Bootstrapping an entire library to compete against Netflix, Disney+, Hulu, et al? Even with 2 billion dollars of funding that's a tall order.
10 minute shows was an interesting gimmick, but it's not that different than a syndicated half hour. It might even be worse—Too long to have the instant gratification of Tiktok and too short to flesh out a good single-episode story arc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go90
No? You don’t? Not a surprise. And nobody will remember Quibi either.
"By playing credits between each act, instead of commercials, Quibi claimed a 10 episode season was actually 40 “low budget under 12 minute episodes”, allowing them to skirt SAG (actors union) and WGA (writers union) minimums. They were a scab-based business model."
https://twitter.com/LukeXCunningham/status/13189766621391462...
Yes, that was their target- but were they really only targeting NYC and a handful of other cities commuters? That's a pretty small TAM. Everyone else in a car and not watching content on their phone.
The content was not compelling, and that's the real story. They overpaid to quickly produce a library with star power and the end results were sub par, and could not compete with free alternatives, or depending on how you look at it- could not force their way into the budgets for consumer's paid streaming services.
For Quibi, it seems the fundamental issue may have been lack of product market fit due to a) not testing, and b) having a shallow understanding of the entertainment market.
You couldn’t take screenshots to share.
What genius thought that would be a good idea?
* I do find it odd and not a good idea for those entities to disallow screenshots, but it certainly is the norm in that world.
In some ways it reminds me of Vine, Periscope, Musically and the other apps that preceded TikTok. Also reminds me of the quick demise of Mixer.
Maybe it is the case of the right idea but at the wrong time. I can only guess the expenses were too high and they have no option to but to fold.
At a certain point those ad bills add up, especially if they aren't able to convert enough free trial people into paid users.
Every single article I read about Quibi before today was about how bad their series are. And while I haven't seen a single show myself, the worst offenders do seem like the type of trash that made people run away from regular TV to begin with. Chrissy's Court, Gayme show, Murder House Flip...
I imagine you can make a bad idea work with good content, and you can make bad content work with a good, convenient platform. But I suppose there is not much you can do when the entire internet is complaining about both of them.
Both Netflix and Hulu have experimented with short form "mobile-optimized" viewing. Short things to watch on your commute or between meetings. Neither had much success with the format.
I don't sit down to watch shows for 30 minutes. Sometimes I'll binge for 2 hours and get 4 different rising-action-falling-action cycles and 4 different cliffhangers trying to keep me on for the next episode, which I was planning on doing anyways.
Sometimes I'll watch for 45 minutes, get halfway through a second episode but have to shut it off for one reason or another, and when I come back the next day I feel disoriented because the plot cycle is built to assume an uninterrupted segment.
I don't think the solution here is 10 minute episodes per se, but I think the flow of storytelling in modern TV series is waiting for some innovation to bring it to the 21st century.
A great example of innovation in storytelling is the Witcher 3. Everytime I boot the game up, during the loading sequence I get a 15 second voiced over "recap" where Geralt informs me about where the main storyline is and what we need to do next, whereas in traditional TV segments I'm given a recap every 30 minutes of progress regardless of where in the show I start and stop watching.
I wonder how many times in talking about the app have people needed to spell it out or say it's pronounced like "kwibee" not "keebee", etc. I actually needed to go to wikipedia.org to see the exact pronunciation.
So much about the branding reminds me of the "Cuil" search engine failure a decade ago. I remember seeing the original name "Cuill" in some of my request logs and thinking at the time that it was some malicious DDOS bot that wanted to see my site as "see you ill". First time that I saw in the news about "Quibi" I immediately thought of the whole "Cuil" search engine failure. Not a great first impression, but that it was.
Anyway, you could say we now all know how it's pronounced. As of today "Quibi" is pronounced dead.
Sounds like top shelf content, let's try a review:
"My most recent pick was Dummy, a show where Anna Kendrick becomes friends with her boyfriend’s sex doll. When I turned my phone horizontally, suddenly I could see a widescreen version of the same series: The sex doll’s legs splayed further along the floor, and in the background I could now see Donal Logue, the actor who plays the boyfriend. ... The episode of Dummy lasted six minutes, just long enough for me to think, What is this?, when I realized that the boyfriend was a barely fictionalized version of Emmy-winning TV writer Dan Harmon. Then it ended."
-- https://www.vulture.com/2020/04/the-bites-are-quick-and-bad....
Okay, bad roulette spin. Here's another view:
"“Dummy” is a semi-autobiographical comedy from Cody Heller, whom Kendrick plays, with Donal Logue portraying her real-life partner Dan Harmon, the Emmy-winning showrunner of “Community” and “Rick & Morty.” The 10-episode series sees Cody imagining that her boyfriend’s sex doll is sentient and high jinks ensue. It is breezy viewing at an average of seven minutes apiece, but the show deserves Emmy recognition for how its frames are so deliberately composed in service of advancing the art form. Relatively few shows contend for Best Short Form Comedy/Drama Series; that the category exists is a testament to the academy’s continual acknowledgement of the evolution of television, which “Dummy” embodies."
-- https://www.goldderby.com/article/2020/anna-kendrick-dummy-q...
I've got to imagine there's a bunch of investors out there who were pretty disappointed in what got launched
Second, they didn’t create short episodes for quick watching, they created full length movies and just carved them up, again this was obvious from their own marketing stuff.
Argument 1: No one wants short-form video. YouTube has been the master at this market, TikTok too! I think there is plenty of space for more short-form content.
Argument 2: No one wants to pay for streaming content. Netflix and Hulu have plenty of varying length content that people willingly pay for.
Ultimately, Quibi itself was weird. Correct me if I'm wrong, but their marketing strategy was, high end short form content, code for Hollywooy-esque content. There's nothing wrong with this style of content, but when I watch something short-form, I expect it to keep my attention when I'm actively holding my phone.
YouTube and TikTok content are both edited to be high paced and leave little room for air. That keeps it engaging when you're on your phone because you just can't look away. If I wanted to relax after a long day, I want to sit on the couch and turn on the TV. That's where typical Hollywood content fits in. Lots of space in between spoken dialog, music, and more reflective pacing.
Quibi tried to give you TV pacing, but short-form format and ultimately that was rejected in the market.
Why on earth didn't they test this thesis before blowing through a billion dollars?
I think we're looking at the test... Something something desperate venture capital.
Quibi may have fared better if they likewise focused on a specific niche of viewers.
My only gripe is that it’s about low quality entertainment. I prefer we take these big risks with projects that might have truly consequential and positive impact: preventative health, air quality in cities like Santiago and Salt Lake City, ecological restoration near dense urban areas, better understanding of complex social dynamics, waste management, screenless recreation.
"Quibi - the TikTok of Netflix."
Now that's a golden ticket idea.
Well, the thing is they didn't. Short-form content isn't exactly a new concept; I've been watching short videos for years on Youtube and other sites. And the way that Big Hollywood executives chose to approach making this short-form content appears to have largely been "make a regular long-form content and chop it up into smaller pieces" which is a high risk move only in the way of the "That's a bold move Cotton" meme.
That's a lot of money up in smoke.
Reading the comments I can see it was mobile-only and short episodes targeted at people riding public transport (or similar short duration where what you can do is very limited and you want to entertain yourself).
Seems like a big failure marketing-wise.
Why should I care about Disney+? It has tons of Disney content.
Why should I care about Shudder? It has tons of horror content.
Why should I care about Quibi?
At what point does a VC that randomly bets on prospects beat the average?
Her track record is attrocious. I say this as someone still reeling from the death of Palm.
I don't think anyone is talking about breaking up YouTube itself, unless I missed something. It would be one of the pieces Google would be broken into.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24852504
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24850702
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24849147
My point is how inconsistent all this is -- on one hand, there is discussion about how YouTube should be broken up because there are not sufficient players. On the other hand a huge contender just shut down because there wasnt sufficient interest in yet another streaming platform.
https://www.theverge.com/2020/10/21/21527197/quibi-streaming...
They credit the WSJ (which may or may not be paywalled depending on referrer?): https://www.wsj.com/articles/quibi-weighs-shutting-down-as-p...
eBay was the world's biggest online marketplace while Amazon was still selling books. eBay could've been Amazon, and perhaps would have been, given a leader with the right vision.
Her tenure at HP was disastrous. And now the Quibi debacle. Can someone please clue me in? I don't know as much as I'd like about her career.
As for HP, has anyone done a good job there? Carly Fiorina had the Compaq debacle, while Leo Apotheker wasted $9 billion buying Autonomy to turn the company into the American SAP.
You couldn’t take screenshots to share.
What absolute moron thought that would be a good idea? Presumably some Boomer who couldn’t be bothered to ask an intern what a meme is.
Netflix doesn't allow screenshots on mobile devices. Neither do Crave (in Canada) or Amazon Prime.
https://newrepublic.com/article/159892/republicans-meg-whitm...
Calling all that a meritocracy makes no sense. It never was. Now the problem today is some people thinking that replacing an aristocracy with a nomenklatura is going to make things better for people at the bottom...
No, don't you understand I totally want to pay $10 a month to hold my phone awkwardly and watch 10 minute videos.
What could go wrong
Which way is that?
> Quibi also faces a patent infringement lawsuit filed by interactive video company Eko, which alleges that Quibi stole its technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically on phones from Eko.
technology allowing viewers to watch episodes either horizontally or vertically
What da fak!
Please especially don't do that to dance on someone's grave. I'm sure that you can express your substantive points thoughtfully.
But this is a massive company which pumped VC money into an untenable idea. I definitely wouldn't have this level of snark if an independent developer, or at least a good faith startup had to shut down.
10 min episodes and you can finish a season in a night is exactly what people want.
Stuff like flipping screens and 'phone only', not so. But they were very easy to pivot on. (Which they did)
So you might think you are smart saying this is obvious, but it's not.
It's only an amount of content issue. Which we also know is solvable. But it's not clear exactly how.