QUIBI

Jeffrey Katzenberg was the former chairman of Walt Disney Studios and co-founder of DreamWorks. Meg Whitman was the former CEO of eBay and HP.

Between them, they had six decades of media and tech experience. In 2018, they launched Quibi — short for "quick bites" — with a thesis that felt logical on paper: people watch videos on their phones in short bursts (waiting in line, on the bus, during lunch), so there's a market for premium, Hollywood-quality content formatted in episodes under 10 minutes.

Katzenberg's Rolodex did the heavy lifting. He personally pitched every major studio, production company, and A-list talent in Hollywood.

He signed deals with Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Chrissy Teigen, and Idris Elba. The content budget was massive — some shows cost $100,000+ per minute of content.

They raised $1 billion before writing a single line of code. Every major Hollywood studio invested.

So did Alibaba, Goldman Sachs, and JPMorgan. The fundraise was one of the largest pre-launch raises in entertainment history.

Quibi was a subscription streaming service — $4.99/month with ads or $7.99/month without. Content was exclusively short-form: episodes between 5 and 10 minutes, grouped into "chapters" that told larger stories across a season.

The innovation was "Turnstyle" — a technology that let viewers seamlessly switch between portrait and landscape mode while watching, with different camera angles for each orientation.

The problem was the value proposition. At $5-8/month, Quibi was competing with Netflix, Hulu, and Disney+ — services with thousands of hours of content.

Quibi launched with about 50 shows. Users could get unlimited free short-form content on YouTube and TikTok.

The "premium short-form" niche that Katzenberg envisioned simply didn't exist as a category people would pay for.

Quibi App — the mobile streaming platform offering short-form premium content in episodes under 10 minutes. Turnstyle Technology — proprietary feature allowing seamless switching between portrait and landscape viewing with different camera angles.

Daily Essentials — short daily news and entertainment segments from partners like BBC, NBC, and ESPN. Quibi Originals — scripted and unscripted series including Most Dangerous Game (starring Liam Hemsworth), Chrissy's Court, and Survive.

Quibi planned a massive marketing blitz around its April 6, 2020 launch — $470 million was reportedly budgeted for marketing. Super Bowl ads, billboard campaigns, influencer partnerships, and a free 90-day trial to drive initial adoption.

The free trial worked, sort of. Quibi hit 1.7 million downloads in its first week.

But the conversion to paid subscribers was catastrophic. After the 90-day trial ended, over 90% of users didn't convert.

By October 2020, the app had been downloaded 9.6 million times but had only 500,000 paying subscribers.

The COVID-19 pandemic was blamed, but it actually should have helped — people were stuck at home with nothing to do. Instead, it exposed the flaw: people stuck at home watched on TVs, not phones.

Quibi had no TV app at launch. By the time they added one, nobody cared.

Everything. The product launched into a pandemic that made its core use case irrelevant — nobody was commuting, waiting in lines, or killing time in public.

The mobile-only strategy meant no TV app, no casting, no sharing clips on social media. The content was decent but forgettable — nothing broke through culturally the way Tiger King did on Netflix that same month.

The Turnstyle technology, while technically impressive, solved a problem nobody had. Users didn't switch between portrait and landscape mid-video.

The $100,000-per-minute content budgets meant the company was burning cash at an extraordinary rate with no path to profitability at 500,000 subscribers.

Katzenberg and Whitman explored selling the company, a pivot to free content with ads, and even merging with another platform. Nobody was interested.

On October 21, 2020, Quibi announced it was shutting down — just six months after launch.

Every major Hollywood studio invested: Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony, Lionsgate, WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, and MGM. Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, and Alibaba Group put in major checks.

The Walton family invested through Madrone Capital. Katzenberg raised $1 billion before the product existed based almost entirely on his personal reputation and relationships.

After shutdown, remaining funds were returned to investors — roughly $350 million of the $1.75 billion.