Quibi launched on April 2020 and closed down just 9 months later.

For those that don’t even remember this footnote in television history, it was a streaming service that made short high end content designed to be watched on mobile devices.

I watched some of its content.. and while it varied, some were genuinely entertaing.

But its failure was swift. As viewers were not too keen on paying for short form content.. or so it seemed.

However the service did have the unfortunate timing of launching a service aimed at people travelling.. while most were in lockdown.

But was that the only reason for its failure?

Was it the wrong content?

Are people willing to pay for video content on their mobile devices?

It’s hard to put any one thing as the reason for its failure. But I remember at the time. It didn’t feel like value for money. This is from someone that pays for Netflix.. and even YouTube premium.. so happy to pay for content on mobile devices.

But it doesn’t matter how hard they try., they are never going to compete with Netflix’s library. So most people just compared the two and thought is was a bad deal.

However, there is far more to it. As consumers often seem super happy to pay much more than the subscription cost of Quibi to their favourite twitch streamer, or YouTuber via patreon. And many channels do very well from this.

I think Quibi struggled because it felt super corperate, and the idea of Netflix quality shows broken up into 10 minuite segments just didn’t seem needed. It wasn’t a compelling reason to add another subscription. And there was nothing for a loyal audience to feel they needed this service.

It’s ironic that short form content is super popular right now. But the content leans into the limited time.. and needs a huge library to be able to be swipable by the viewer. Only the likes of YouTube and tik-tok can achieve this scale.

So I wonder. Will anything like this ever be tried again?

And what do you think could have made it work?