R.I.P Quibi. You Tried.
Reflections on the short life of the video streaming platform Quibi
Quibi, short for “Quick Bites,” was launched with the promise of being a premium short-form video content platform. It was created by Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former co-founder, and CEO of Dreamworks, using $2 billion in funding, mostly from major Hollywood film studios. They had original high production value content, created with big names like Chrissy Teigen, Anna Kendrick, Reese Witherspoon, and Liam Hemsworth as showrunners. It also boasted of a wide mix of shows including reality TV, self-help shows, documentary, and fictional shows. It was supposed to provide HBO-quality short-form content, targeted at millennials who are on- the- go. To put it succinctly, this is what Jeffrey Katzenberg had to say about the service in an NBC News interview last year:
“ If you are between 25–30 y.o which is our core audience, you wake up every day, you leave your home and you take a television set with you; and between 7 (a.m) in the morning and 7 (p.m) in the night, right now, today you are watching 70 mins (on) youtube, Snapchat, Instagram, FB watch. That stuff’s fantastic, but we think we can bring Hollywood quality to that kind of consumption and bring a level of storytelling that the creators in that world have never been able to afford to do because they didn't have the resources. In a subscription service, we actually can do it. Its not dissimilar to what HBO did in the 1990’s , when they came along and said we are not TV we are HBO. We would say to you we are not short- form we are Quibi ”
- Jeffery Katzenberg
Given the amount of Hollywood backing the platform received, there were great expectations for Quibi’s performance this year. However, according to a report by mobile analytics firm Sensor Tower, a total of 910,000 users downloaded the app back in April, and of those users, only about 72,000 stuck around after three months.
I was one of the 910,000 users who downloaded this app in April. I am a self-admitted YouTube addict. I can spend a lot of time looking at educational or entertainment content on YouTube. I have also paid for YouTube Premium to watch shows by my favorite YouTubers. Quibi was appealing to me in the same way as YouTube Premium. The content seemed high quality and the company was offering a three-month free trial, which was too enticing to pass. But like a lot of people, I decided not to continue with the paid service after the three-month mark. In late October 2020, barely seven months after its launch, Quibi announced it was closing for good. The hope is that Quibi’s collection of shows will soon find a new streaming home, but Qubi will no longer be a functioning platform after December this year.
So what went wrong with Quibi, so quickly?
I would say Quibi made some erroneous assumptions about video streaming habits. When these assumptions are broken down, the flaws in Quibi’s product design and subsequently in its identity crisis as a streaming platform becomes clear. Let us examine these flawed assumptions in detail.
Assumption 1: Having something for everyone is a good thing.
I think Quibi had some great things going for it. Each episode of Quibi was an episodic broken into “chapters” that were about 10 minutes long. Another aspect of Quibi its mobile-friendly viewing screen that could seamlessly toggle between portrait and landscape mode while streaming. Having used the app myself, I would say that Quibi seemed quite a robust app: aesthetically pleasing, functionally good at streaming, and provided an intuitive interface. I really enjoyed some of the shows such as a documentary called “Shape of Pasta” and a crime dramedy called “Flipped”.
What I absolutely did not like about Quibi was having to scroll through the trailers of new programs, which rolled out every week. They had nothing in common with what I would have chosen to watch. For example, a week into my subscription, a new show called “Dishmantled” premiered, which was a game show where food was blown up on people. Every time I opened the app, the show’s trailer would pop up right in my face on the homepage, which was annoying because I absolutely DID NOT want to watch it.
I understand that Quibi wanted to provide something for everyone in the GenZ / Millennial demographic. However, this age group is very diverse, and creating something for everyone, unsurprisingly just made the content lack any sort of direction. It was confusing to have meditation and mindfulness shows like “The Daily Chill” right alongside noisy, gag-reflex inducing game shows like “Dishmantled”.
Also, there was no way to send feedback if you did not want these shows to come up in your recommendations. A simple thumbs up/ down would have been really nice! Or maybe right after downloading the app, new users could have been directed to a quick onboarding survey to determine their specific tastes. If Quibi planned on competing with other streaming platforms like Netflix and Hulu, personalizing user preferences amidst a wide range of use cases would have seemed like an obvious feature to have. However, I did not get any sense of personalization for my homepage. Every time I logged in Quibi would show me ALL of its content, which was not an enjoyable experience.
Assumption 2: People will pay for bite-sized content if high production value content is created.
Quibi knew that it was going to be competing in a market full of short-form content creators like YouTube, FaceBook, TikTok, etc. This is clearly evident from Jeffrey’s interviews about Quibi. The selling point of Quibi was to do what has already been done before, but do it better, flashier, and with a bigger budget. Indeed, some of Quibi’s content were full-fledged high production movies divided into 10 min parts. But the assumption that a high production value version of short-form content would entice users to shell out money for the app, actually hurt Quibi than helped it. Trying out many kinds of programming in short form and not truly understanding the nuances of the use cases of already available free short-form video streaming seems to be a direct consequence of that assumption.
For example, in my personal use case scenario, I knew I could have watched my preferred content in bite-sized parts over time. However, dividing a movie into parts did not make sense to me. First of all, a two-hourish movie was not long enough to have a broken-up TV series, with a max of ten episodes. It felt as though if it was going to end soon, it did not deserve my loyalty. Secondly, if I wanted to watch a movie that was streaming on an app like Netflix, I would make time for it and most likely create an experience surrounding it, such as inviting friends over to watch it. The same applies to watching a movie in a theatre as well. In my experience, high-quality content, like a movie, has always been something to treasure with some quality time in hand, and it would be a waste to watch them hurriedly in a bite-sized format. Now can a short form content be of good quality? Yes, and I’ll definitely acknowledge that. However, to assume everything that is high-quality content can be translated into short-form content was a mistake.
The next part of this assumption is that free tier subscribers will become paying consumers of high-quality, short-form content. To understand the folly of this assumption, let’s first examine what is celebrated in the free short-form content that we already use. A lot of short-form content apart from being free is also heavily motivated by the content maker’s personality and style, such as the case of YouTubers. Or is created by a friend, like a video meme on TikTok. Or it is a recommendation based on your preferences/social circle. People don’t necessarily crave or want to pay for excellent quality short-form video content when the free content is already a decent quality or has other social aspects to it that make it valuable to subscribers.
Assumption 3: Short format video content consumption can exist outside of a socially inclined streaming platform.
For better or for worse short-form content that we consume today is always built around a social context. Yes, Facebook, Tik Tok, and Instagram are primarily social media sites/apps so any video content on it would in fact be an extension of the social media environment. However, even video streaming websites like YouTube that have been built primarily for video content have a section to comment, like, and subscribe which mirrors the social media style community engagement. Other types of non-video short-form content, such as GIFs on Imgur, Reddit articles, or WebComics on webtoons, also have strong community engagement through comments, share, and downvote/ upvote features. Quibi severely lacked a social component to engage its community. You couldn’t comment or like on show episodes or share clips from the show with your friends.
A lot of shows on Netflix have gained an audience because of memes that were made from video clippings or screenshots from the show's take, such as with the “Tiger King.” It’s a free marketing tool that Quibi could have easily exploited. To be fair they did bring in a screenshot feature sometime around July this year, but the damage from the lack of user engagement was already done!
Social feedback is a much powerful motivator than high-quality video content and it is very unlikely that it will be possible to extract short-form content away from the social aspect of engaging with it. Too bad Quibi realized this too late!
If only Quibi knew itself better…
Quibi’s problems were more than the assumptions discussed in this article. For example, Quibi’s marketing campaign was so confusing! I discovered Quibi through ads that were frankly not very informative. These ads tried to make the word “Quibi” synonymous with a few minutes of impulsive video watching, caught in between breaks. For example, some of their ad campaign slogans included phrases like “… just wait a Quibi”. I get the intention was to sound clever and fun, but for someone completely unaware of what the product is, it took some time to really understand the context of these phrases. Also, even when you did understand the ads, they didn't seem very compelling, since people already follow other short-form content elsewhere.
In my case, I follow apps like Webtoons and my social media for content like that. It wasn’t until I saw a trailer of “Flipped,” a comedy series that was being aired on Quibi, that I was intrigued enough to try it. For a platform that was conceived to be a high production value content provider, this CONTENT should have been the center point of marketing.
When asked about Quibi’s failure at gaining an audience, Jeffrey Katzenberg replied that he entirely blamed COVID-19 for its performance. While that statement might be true to some extent, it also grossly underestimates Quibi’s underlying identity crisis. Quibi was trying to create a completely new market that would herald a new style of programming in a mobile-only technological format. The concept was great but had no place for iteration or continuous improvement or scope for organic growth through wide user engagement. It was strange to see a new market being created out of sheer will power, and not the principles underlying a lean startup model. It wanted to come out of the door trying to be an established company like HBO for a niche market when in reality it was another technological start-up. I wish they had stuck with being an agile tech company, instead of trying to be HBO and losing out. In the end, I would say that Quibi did try pivoting, adding TV apps, and screen sharing. But by then it had lost the people rooting for it!
…. R.I.P Quibi, you tried!….
