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Media & Streaming

Quibi

Shut down · 2020

Mobile-only short-form streaming platform offering Hollywood-produced shows in 10-minute episodes.

Los Angeles, USA2018–2020

Key metrics

$1.8B

Total funding

200 people

Team at peak

2

Funding rounds

Outcome

Shut down

Operations ended in 2020.

2020

Financial trajectory

Funding by round

$1.1B$746.7M$373.3M$0$1B2018Series A$750M2020Series B

The Story

Founded

Series A

$1B

Series B

$750M

Shut down

What worked

  1. 01

    Quibi's core technology was genuinely novel

    Its "Turnstyle" player — which reformatted video seamlessly between portrait and landscape as a viewer rotated their phone — was distinctive enough that a rival streaming startup, Eko, later sued over it.

  2. 02

    Katzenberg and Whitman also pulled off something almost no unproven company manages

    Committing more than 175 shows and 8,500 episodes from A-list Hollywood talent before a single subscriber had signed up, entirely on the strength of their own industry reputations.

What didn't work

  1. 01

    Quibi spent roughly $1 billion producing premium, Hollywood-budget content before validating that anyone actually wanted 10-minute mobile-only shows

    There was no beta test, no MVP, no focus group ahead of launch.

  2. 02

    Leadership treated Netflix and HBO

    As the competition while ignoring the platforms actually winning short-form attention, TikTok and YouTube, both free.

  3. 03

    A no-screenshots policy blocked the organic sharing mobile-native audiences rely on, and when the pandemic pushed viewing from commutes onto living-room TVs, Quibi had no TV app ready — it didn't ship one until October 20, 2020, one day before announcing it was shutting down.

No Product-Market FitDistribution FailureTiming (Too Early/Late)

THE VENTURE TRAIL TAKE

Quibi's failure is unusually well documented because almost nothing about it was small

not the funding, not the talent, not the marketing spend, not the speed of the collapse. That makes it a useful case less for any single mistake and more for how the mistakes compounded.

Read the full postmortem

Company details

Business model
D2C Subscription
Founded
2018
Headquarters
Los Angeles, USA
Team at peak
200 people
Funding rounds
2
Investors
Disney · Alibaba Group · Time Warner · Google · Walmart · Madrone Capital Partners
Burn rate
$165M/mo
Reported liquidity
$350M

Founders

Jeffrey Katzenberg
Chairman; former Disney studio chairman and DreamWorks Animation co-founder
Meg Whitman
CEO; former eBay CEO and Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO

Sources

  1. 01Yahoo FinanceQuibi shuts down: Why the $1.75 billion streaming app failed
  2. 02VarietyQuibi Officially Shuts Down, Content No Longer Available to Stream
  3. 03How They GrowWhy Quibi Died: The $2B Dumpster Fire That Was Supposed to Revolutionize Hollywood
  4. 04AxiosReport: Quibi shutting amid pandemic struggles
  5. 05Crunchbase NewsQuibi Is Shutting Down After Raising $1.75B In Funding

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