Quibi Can Turn It Around By Doing This — Ari Lewis

It takes either audacious self-confidence or reckless hubris to build a completely asocial video app in 2020. You can decide which best describes Quibi, Hollywood’s $1.75 billion-funded attempt at a mobile-only Netflix of six to 10-minute micro-TV show episodes. Quibi manages to miss every trend and tactic that could help make its app popular. The ... See more

The consensus view, then as now, is that the content was not good, it was not shareable (no screenshots!), and that Quibi blew through too much money too fast, before they could figure out what they were doing. But also, they spent too little money to effectively compete with Netflix, HBO, Apple, Disney, etc.

In yesterday’s Daily Update I described how Jeffrey Katzenberg, the founder of Quibi, mistakenly assumed that mobile was simply the next step in the evolution from motion pictures to television, each of which created new possibilities for, in Katzenberg’s words, “the creativity of storytellers [to use] these tools in ways that their inventors had n... See more