Quibi co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has revealed that despite all the trials and tribulations the short form SVOD service has experienced since launch, he is optimistic about the service’s future.
Quibi launched in April with nearly two billion dollars in funding, a sold out ad inventory and plenty of major talent to make content for the mobile-only streaming service. Within a week though the app had fallen out of the list of Top 40 free apps on Apple’s U.S. app store, and two months on the service is seen as having fallen short of even modest expectations.
Blame has been thrown about left and right with Katzenberg in past interviews putting it on timing due to the pandemic impacting their business. Now, appearing at SeriesFest (via Deadline), he engaged in some classic corporate speak and has spun the bad news as a positive.
He says the pandemic became “a little bit of a cement wall that we ran into”. As such he still has a lot of faith in the product they are selling and even sees this first few months of a slow start as beneficial, something of a beta test ahead of a real push:
“I’m quite optimistic that this use case is going to work. … People are loving this… it’s actually given us the opportunity to have almost a beta. … In nine weeks, we have actually now seen so many aspects of the content, about what is working for them, what is most appealing to them, where our weaknesses are. All of that is being retooled as we talk here right now. We’re leaning in twice as hard on things that are working the best and leaning away from the things that are not.”
Quibi has been burning money at an alarming rate as subscribers growth has slowed and advertisers want to re-negotiate terms. Earlier this week a report in The Wall Street Journal estimated it will not even reach 2 million paying subscribers in its first year of operation – a far cry from its own projections of 7.4 million subscribers prior to launch. Can Katzenberg right the ship? Time will tell.
