Likely a new HBS case study: Quibi

Is anyone else following Quibi (or even downloaded it)? I think it’ll soon be a business school case study on what went wrong.

The team (Jeffrey Katzenberg / Meg Whitman) raised $1.75bn, recruited some big names for producing and staring (Steven Spielberg and Liam Hemsworth), and sold $150m of add inventory pre-launch. Some of those investors are the BBC, Disney, Sony, Warner Bros., Fox, Viacom, and Goldman Sachs. And Google, Walmart, and Proctor & Gamble are among the advertisers. So far Jeffrey has blamed Covid full-stop for the failure it looks to be becoming.

I downloaded it when the press release came out and believe there are some large underlying issues that range from (1) the phone to an iPad rendering not working properly; (2) still receiving adds after you’re paying for the service (interrupting your 8-10 minute episodes…); to (3) the fact that people don’t love to watch television on just their phones. In reality, why not just pay YouTube the same fee for a premium, get no adds, and a platform that works from mobile, tablet, to television (something that Quibi does not).

It seems like no consumers like the platform: downloads and searches have become slim. IMO, this is what happens when two previously successful individuals raise a lot of money to build an MVP that users simply don’t like or care for. They could have likely figured this out with much less capital raised and spent.