I never understood their pitch in first place.
Why pay for quick bites when I get decent content (~10min) for free on youtube?
Generally, I would assume people watch netflix/amazon/disney content for entertainment and expect their originals to be of the usual or slight longer duration. That's content to enjoy watching over a longer period of time. People like this format, hence binge watching is a thing.
I can't see why people would rather watch a highly produced quick bite while waiting in line for a coffee instead of watching a new upload from a subscribed creator on youtube for like 10 minutes. There are plenty of famous youtubers upload almost daily, with daily/weekly views much higher than the total app downloads quibi has so far. And they don't have a ~2B$ war chest.
Verizon attempted a similar content/audience strategy to Quibi several years ago, with their content platform called go90 [1]. Their pitch centered around the lack of 15-20 minute video content with high production values, and the assumption that this type of content would be successful with millennials and commuters.
They burned over $1B and it was a colossal failure -- apparently so forgettable that none of the coverage on Quibi even mentions it.
One major difference: go90 was a free service, and it was even zero-rated for Verizon Wireless customers (i.e. didn't count against subscriber data caps). Yet it remained a failure across several attempted pivots before Verizon threw in the towel completely.
> the lack of 15-20 minute video content with high production values,
What a truly bizarre tack if that's what they really though. A "30 minute" TV episode is actually about 20-21 minutes minus the ads, intro, and credits.
And then promptly went back to either reading stuff in Instapaper, or listening to podcasts, or playing Pokémon Go if we were moving at a slow enough speed.
