Nearly three years after the implosion of short-form streaming service Quibi, producer and former studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg says he remains proud of the effort he put into the startup.
Katzenberg and former eBay and Hewlett Packard Enterprise CEO Meg Whitman founded Quibi which aimed to become the “HBO of short-form mobile video”.
The mobile-only streaming platform raised $1.75 billion in capital and launched April 2020 just as people found themselves confined to their homes at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.
As a result, the service failed to generate enough of a subscriber base, hitting just 710,000 subscriber households in the third quarter of 2020, which was a long way from the 7 million paying subscribers they hoped to reach in the first year.
So the service was shut down after just six months, and three months after that Roku paid less than $100 million to acquire all the assets of Quibi. In an interview with LinkedIn CEO Ryan Roslansky recently, Katzenberg says:
“I’m humbled by the failure, but I’m proud that what we tried was a moonshot… Owning my failures is as important, or actually more [important], than owning my successes. I’m proud to own the failure. I’m not proud of the failure. But I’m proud of what we tried. It was a moonshot. It wasn’t fun failing – I don’t recommend it – but it’s going to come.”
The likes of Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Jennifer Lopez, Sam Raimi, Reese Witherspoon, Antoine Fuqua, Lena Waithe, Kevin Hart and Steven Soderbergh all worked on Quibi projects in their time.
Source: Variety
