I paid for Quibi. I want that on the record, because I think you learn more from the launches you bought into than the ones you mocked from a distance.
I downloaded it the week it came out, turned my phone sideways during an episode, watched the frame recompose itself, and said out loud to nobody, that is genuinely clever. It is. The turnstile thing is real engineering, and the talent list was absurd in the good way. Almost two billion dollars of absurd.
Six weeks later it is sliding out of the rankings and the retention numbers are the kind that get leaked rather than announced.
Katzenberg told the Times this month that he attributes what has gone wrong to the virus. I understand the impulse. I also think it is the wrong autopsy, and getting it wrong is expensive for everyone watching.
Quibi did not lose its audience to the pandemic, it lost the errand its product was designed to run, and a brand built on an errand is only as durable as that errand.
Read the original pitch again. Quick bites for the in-between minutes. The train, the line at lunch, the ten minutes before a meeting starts. That is not a description of a want. It is a description of a context. The whole proposition was located in a physical circumstance that a hundred million people stopped having on the same weekend in March, which meant the product did not degrade, it simply had nowhere to stand.
Compare that to what people actually reach for in those same minutes. YouTube does not care where you are. Netflix does not care. TikTok has been eating that exact attention for two years without ever telling anyone which part of their day it was for. None of them staked a positioning on your commute, so none of them noticed when the commute went away.
Here is the part that gets lost. The virus did not invent this fragility, it revealed it on a schedule nobody could have picked. If you build a brand around a moment in someone's day, you have quietly handed your survival to their calendar. Weekends change. Jobs change. Kids arrive. The moment moves and you do not move with it, because you told everyone that the moment was the point.
Also, and I say this with affection: nobody was asking. Not one person in any session I have ever run said the problem with television is that it does not fit in the elevator.
The virus did not invent this fragility, it revealed it on a schedule nobody could have picked.
The app is still on my second home screen. I keep meaning to open it during the twelve minutes I now spend walking to Stumptown, the only coffee I buy outside anymore, and every time I put on a podcast instead.