Veteran media and tech exec and Big Tech billionaire Meg Whitman is being been nominated for a top diplomatic post.

President Biden Wednesday (Dec. 8) announced his intention to nominate Whitman as ambassador to the Republic of Kenya, a nomination which will be submitted to the Senate for its approval.

Whitman is the former CEO of eBay, Hewlett-Packard and more recently Quibi, the shuttered short-form mobile subscription video app. She was also a strategic planning executive for Disney back in the 1980s.

Whitman had been a Republican fund-raiser when the rise of Donald Trump pushed her to support Democrat Hillary Clinton for president.

She then streamed her support for then-presidential candidate Biden at the Democratic National Convention. ■

Turns out Quibi’s life was nearly as short as the content it mistakenly thought people wanted to stream.

Founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and backed by $1.75 billion in capital from the major studios including Disney and Warner Bros., Quibi is shutting down.

"The world has changed dramatically since Quibi launched and our standalone business model is no longer viable," Katzenberg said in a statement. "I am deeply grateful to our employees, investors, talent, studio partners and advertisers for their partnership in bringing Quibi to millions of mobile devices.”

Amid the rush of companies into streaming, Katzenberg’s pitch was that mobile viewers would pay to watch shows in 10-minute chunks. Unfortunately for Quibi, the pandemic made people much less mobile. And while people were streaming tons of content at home, Quibi was not compatible with large-screen TV sets.

Also read: Quibi Finally Hits the Big Screen with Amazon, Apple and Google Devices

Some critics said Quibi’s expensive content from mainstream talent wasn’t attractive to the young viewers it wanted to target.

On top of that, the company had to fight a lawsuit from, Eko, a company claiming that its patent for showing video both vertically and horizontally was being infringed.

Quibi wound up getting fewer downloads and less usership than it expected, even after offering free trials. That disappointed blue chip marketers who had bought $150 million in advertising on the services.

In a last-ditch effort at survival Quibi belatedly made deals with Amazon, Apple and Android that allowed viewers to watch its content on full-size TV sets.

Evan Shapiro, who headed the former SVOD comedy service Seeso, commented on Quibi's short life span.

With a flurry of five short commercials during the Oscars telecast, Quibi kicked off the ad blitz it needs to teach potential subscribers such basics as how to pronounce the company’s name (say “kwih-bee”), and why they might use the mobile streaming-video service in the first place. 

The ad blitz was also a metaphor for Quibi itself and the challenges it faces launching a new entertainment brand, built entirely around short-form mobile video consumption, into the brutally competitive online-streaming sector. 

On Oscar night, the brief ads made the point that even when time is tight, you can still watch all of a Quibi episode. Its series—Quibi plans 175 of them, and 8,500 pieces of content in its first year—will unfold in seven- to 10-minute bites over multiple weeks. Ads wrapped around Quibi episodes will be short too, from 6- to 15-seconds long. For access to all that, subscribers will pay about $5 a month for an ad-supported version of Quibi, and $8 per month for an ad-free version. 

Also Read: CES 2020: Quibi Looks for More Successful Drive While Going 90

The Quibi Oscar ads invoked a range of genres–-from animation to a zombie infestation to an explorer stuck in quicksand. Similarly, Quibi’s content will include all kinds of scripted genres, as well as game shows, reality competitions and more. 

The Quibi ads were pricey, punchy, and well produced. Ad Age reported that ABC charged up to $2.8 million for 30-second Oscar ads. Throw in Quibi’s $5.6 million Super Bowl commercial from a week earlier, and Quibi is well on the way to spending down that $470 million the company said it would invest on launch marketing.

Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman also are paying big money to creative talent, up to $100,000 per minute for what are feature-length stories diced into short pieces. Even better, Quibi creators get back rights to the full-length version of their show in two years, and the episodic version in seven years. 

The Quibi Oscar blitz was a useful metaphor in another way, too. Despite the plethora of ads, Quibi needed just about all of them to get its message across amid all the other brands, especially the many Disney-owned networks that also ran commercials.

Those networks included Hulu, National Geographic, Freeform, ABC and its local affiliate, and of course, just-launched Disney Plus. Quibi launches into a streaming universe that already includes as many as 300 services, with at least two more big ones launching soon after Quibi’s April 6 debut: Comcast’s Peacock and AT&T’s HBO Max.

Innovation

Quibi is trying to create a unique approach to entertainment, focused on mobile, short-form, episodic video displayed through an innovative Turnstyle interface that fills your phone’s screen with an image whether you watch in portrait or landscape mode. 

That dual approach, by the way, can double post-production costs, editors on several Quibi projects said, because each scene must be reframed and cut for the different aspect ratios.  More worrisome, when Katzenberg and Whitman appeared at the Sundance Film Festival a few weeks back, the Quibi interface still wasn’t locked down, about two months from launch.

This Turnstyle technology is already the subject of patent infringement litigation, with a New York-based video technology company claiming in a California federal court that it developed the tech that lets users quickly transition from profile to landscape viewing modes, and back.

In May, Quibi lawyers testified that the company would face "immense harm" if it were to have to "rip out" its core Turnstyle feature. Two months later, though, a few weeks after denying plaintiff tech company Eko an injunction in its patent infringement battle with Quibi, a federal judge ruled that the suit's core complaint's can proceed. 

Quibi's Challenge

In any era, Quibi’s challenge would be substantial: Building an entertainment brand around a largely untested medium, user interface and business model. The company has no library of proven shows, yet hopes to shift customer viewing habits so they will pay for unknown content featuring prominent talent. 

Katzenberg and Whitman have raised a prodigious amount of money for Quibi, $1.75 billion since its 2018 introduction, from an admirable investor list that includes just about every studio in Hollywood.

Quibi has also enlisted a remarkable and broad list of creators, from Katzenberg’s former DreamWorks co-founder Steven Spielberg, to Kiefer Sutherland, Liam Hemsworth, Christoph Waltz, Idris Elba, Andy Garcia, Antoine Fuqua, Will Forte, Lena Waithe, and plenty of others. 

But Quibi arrives just as a bunch of big companies, including some of their own investors, are also trying to make a splash with their own services. And Quibi’s biggest competitor for user attention is probably YouTube, which generates $15 billion a year in ad revenue, and is backed by a trillion-dollar company, pays nothing for most of its content, and is free to users. 

As further evidence of the formidable challenge Quibi faces just from YouTube, App Annie released a study showing that even among the world’s five biggest mobile-video apps, YouTube vacuums up 70 percent of time spent. Most of the top 10 mobile video services are based in China and India, including Tencent News, Tencent Video, IQIYI, Xigua Video, Youku, Baidu Haokan, MXPlayer, and Hotstar. Netflix is sixth on App Annie’s list. 

"YouTube has a hybrid offering of long- and short-form content, as opposed to a service like TikTok (one-minute maximum) or Netflix (30- to 60-minute episodes and 60+-minute movies),” the App Annie report says. "This wider breadth of content helps better suit consumers’ viewing habits: there’s something for you regardless of how much time and attention you have available."

App Annie, which tracks usage of mobile apps, projects that “our smartphones are set to be battleground for consumer mindshare and ad dollars,” with a projected $240 billion to be spent on mobile advertising this year, up 25 percent. Quibi’s premium approach is betting that it can persuade some of YouTube’s sea of users to pay with more than their attention to get better quality content from big-name talent.

In the first several weeks of its launch, various app services tracked middling download performance, and reviews have been generally poor. Barclays media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar has called the service "an old-media mindset squeezed into a new-media form factor without any purpose."

If that weren’t enough for Quibi, there’s even Ficto, a free ad-supported mobile video service that has been running in beta for months. Instead of paying creators substantial up-front funding, Ficto offers a blockchain-based system to track and pay out royalties based on audience views, said CEO Mike Esola. 

For Quibi, Ficto is just another in a long list of competitors for audience attention and dollars. Quibi’s best hope may be that, like on Oscar night, its blizzard of short content can find an audience willing to watch, and pay for, what it has to say. 

Struggling mobile streaming service Quibi continues to deal with bad press, with Vulture chiming in Monday with a damning 6,200-word feature resonating badly for the service across the social internet. 

And to make things even worse for the startup, it has reached the end of the promotional line for users who signed up for the free 90-day trial when Quibi launched back on April 6. 

Across the subscription video business, only a fraction of those who sign up for a free service are converted into paying customers. In early May, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said the app had been downloaded around 3.5 million times and that it had 1.3 million active users. 

Also read: Can Quibi Build a Brand From Scratch Amid Stiff Streaming Competition?

Backed with $1.75 billion in venture capital, and announcing before it launched that it had already sold out $150 million worth of first-year advertising inventory, Quibi doesn’t seem to be on the verge of throwing in the towel. 

But those who write about the service these days seem to punctuate their narratives with failure, and today’s Vulture feature hardly inspires confidence that Quibi will eventually find its footing. 

Among the notably damning tidbits from writer Benjamin Wallace’s Vulture piece:

> Quibi might have entered the market over-confident.
“I can honestly say I’ve never been in such a cocky pitch environment,” comedy writer-producer Scott Gairdner told Wallace. “I would describe the atmosphere as almost Wolf of Wall Street, not in terms of actual debauchery, but it’s an incredibly nice office that just goes and goes. They had two lobbies; you went in and checked in at a nice, big lobby, then you were moved to another lobby. There’s massive jars of expensive, nice-seeming candy everywhere. It’s sleek and modern, and you see hundreds of people passing by. And there’s this energy of people who really believe they’ve got the next big thing.”

> While it’s working with A-list creators, Quibi might not be getting their best work. 
“One media investor suggested the quality of Quibi’s lineup reflected ‘an adverse selection bias,’” Wallace writes. “In other words, Quibi is getting A-talent’s B-material, or else producers’ desk-drawer scripts, which haven’t been able to attract a more established buyer. 'If we have a show that’s going to be a huge hit, you pitch to Netflix, HBO,” says a producer with a project at Quibi. ‘If it doesn’t get traction, you pitch to Quibi.’”

> Quibi’s top executives may not have been in touch with the mobile video consumer. 
“I’m not sure I’d classify myself as an entertainment enthusiast,” CEO Meg Whitman told Wallace. Asked if there are any particular shows she likes, she replied “Grant … On the History Channel. It’s about President Grant.”

> Katzenberg and Whitman are dismissive of staff input.
While they “stocked the Quibi offices with young employees who are in the demographic they’re trying to reach,” Wallace writes, “there was an incredible lack of knowledge of the audience and dismissiveness of the audience,” a former Quibi employee told him. “A thing Jeffrey always says is ‘I’m not a child or mother, but I made movies children and mothers loved. I know millennials better than millennials.” 

> Katzenberg lost site of who the real Quibi audience is.
“Some of Quibi’s own ads in the run-up to launch seemed ego driven,” Wallace writes. “Why was an app aimed at 25-to-35-year-olds being advertised on the Oscars broadcast, which has a median viewer age north of 56? Quibi’s marketing pushed the platform rather than the shows on it. ‘He was so invested in the idea of showing that the critics were wrong,” a former employee says of Katzenberg.'”

Again, here’s the entire Vulture piece.

Responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Quibi would soon be conducting layoffs, its top-level managers published a memo this morning reassuring a staff that the startup is “in good financial position.

“Nothing has changed since our last company meeting two weeks ago,” read the memo, sent from Quibi’s movie-mogul founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and its Silicon Valley celebrity CEO, Meg Whitman.

“As we said in that meeting, we will look for ways to tighten our belt. We are not laying off staff as a part of cost saving measures. We’ve recently added a dozen new Quibi employees.”

The memo, which was obtained by entertainment trades including The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, said that Katzenberg, Whitman and the rest of Quibi’s senior executive staff would take 10% pay cuts.

Visit Next TV to read more stories like this one. 

Quibi is backed by $1.75 billion in venture capital, and it said it has sold out its first-year sponsorship inventory worth $150 million. But the service has been slow to gather subscribers since its April 6 launch, accumulating a reported 1.6 million of them, many on a free three-month promotion briefly available in April. WSJ, which reported on the Quibi staff meeting several weeks ago, also said Quibi advertisers are looking for breaks from their original payment agreements.

Related: Quibi’s Blue Chip Advertisers Looking to Revise Deals

Katzenberg notably blamed the slow start on trying to launch a streaming service enabled only on smart phones in a market where consumers have all been quarantined in their living quarters. But in that meeting two weeks ago, Quibi brass collectively conceded that their content mix may have been off-target, relying too much on scripted shows. Bloomberg reported last week that Quibi has already begun altering its programming slate, with a renewed focus on a reality lifestyle genre that appeals to older women.

Related: Quibi Appealing to Older Female Demo, Rejiggers Programming Slate

“We are excited about the future,” Katzenberg and Whitman insisted Wednesday. “As we shared in our most recent company meeting, the best is yet to come. We are confident in Quibi and the work that you are creating every day.”

Meanwhile, Katzenberg and Whitman also disputed a New York Post Page Six report that said Quibi staffers were unhappy that Reese Witherspoon had reportedly made $6 million to narrate a low-rated nature documentary, Fierce Queens.

“We are pleased with the performance of Fierce Queens,” the memo said. “The talent compensation was utterly inaccurate. We are grateful for Reese’s continued support of Quibi."

Responding to a Wall Street Journal report that Quibi would soon be conducting layoffs, its top-level managers published a memo this morning reassuring a staff that the startup is “in good financial position.

“Nothing has changed since our last company meeting two weeks ago,” read the memo, sent from Quibi’s movie-mogul founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and its Silicon Valley celebrity CEO, Meg Whitman.

“As we said in that meeting, we will look for ways to tighten our belt. We are not laying off staff as a part of cost saving measures. We’ve recently added a dozen new Quibi employees.”

The memo, which was obtained by entertainment trades including The Hollywood Reporter and Deadline, said that Katzenberg, Whitman and the rest of Quibi’s senior executive staff would take 10% pay cuts.

Quibi is backed by $1.75 billion in venture capital, and it said it has sold out its first-year sponsorship inventory worth $150 million. But the service has been slow to gather subscribers since its April 6 launch, accumulating a reported 1.6 million of them, many on a free three-month promotion briefly available in April. WSJ, which reported on the Quibi staff meeting several weeks ago, also said Quibi advertisers are looking for breaks from their original payment agreements.

Also Read: Quibi’s Blue Chip Advertisers Looking to Revise Deals

Katzenberg notably blamed the slow start on trying to launch a streaming service enabled only on smart phones in a market where consumers have all been quarantined in their living quarters. But in that meeting two weeks ago, Quibi brass collectively conceded that their content mix may have been off-target, relying too much on scripted shows. Bloomberg reported last week that Quibi has already begun altering its programming slate, with a renewed focus on a reality lifestyle genre that appeals to older women.

Also Read: Quibi Appealing to Older Female Demo, Rejiggers Programming Slate

“We are excited about the future,” Katzenberg and Whitman insisted Wednesday. “As we shared in our most recent company meeting, the best is yet to come. We are confident in Quibi and the work that you are creating every day.”

Meanwhile, Katzenberg and Whitman also disputed a New York Post Page Six report that said Quibi staffers were unhappy that Reese Witherspoon had reportedly made $6 million to narrate a low-rated nature documentary, Fierce Queens.

“We are pleased with the performance of Fierce Queens,” the memo said. “The talent compensation was utterly inaccurate. We are grateful for Reese’s continued support of Quibi."

After committing to first-year sponsorship deals worth a reported $150 million, Quibi’s 10 bluechip advertising partners are now looking for a break.

According to the Wall Street Journal, the companies are seeking to revise deal terms with mobile-first streaming startup Quibi, following a softer-than-hoped-for product launch and the sudden steep recessionary turn of the global economy. 

Also read: Quibi Content Is Good, But Not Good Enough to Win the ‘Attention Game,’ Analyst Says

Quibi’s iOS and Android mobile apps have been downloaded around 4.2 million times since the service launched April 6. According to the WSJ, around 1.5 million users signed up for the mobile-only service through the first-three-months-free promotion that was being offered in April. 

Quibi is targeting 7 million first-year signups. That's still doable, but Jeffrey Katzenberg’s startup will have to turn things around soon for that to happen. 

And now, the startup streaming service--backed by $1.75 billion in venture capital--is facing a pullback from ad backers including PepsiCo, Walmart, Yum Brands, Anheuser Bush InBev and Taco Bell

“We deeply value the commitments our advertising partners have made and are working in close partnership with them to learn and help them be successful on the platform,” Nicole McCormack, Quibi’s head of advertising partnerships, said in a statement.

‘We Feel Like We’ll Get Through This’

WSJ also reported that Quibi conducted an “all hands on deck” meeting last week, during which executives conceded that the COVID-19 pandemic isn’t the only factor limiting its launch performance. (Notably, just two weeks ago, Katzenberg told WSJ, “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to the coronavirus.”)

Quoting an unnamed meeting participant, the paper said an “over-reliance” on scripted shows was an issue for Quibi, as were too many inactive users and low overall enthusiasm for the service. 

Amid the pandemic-fueled lockdown of video production facilities worldwide, Quibi continues to create original shows, and reality seems to now be the genre of choice—for example, the platform just launched a show built around “Kirby Jenner,” the performance artist who pretends to be a denizen of the Kardashian/Jenner celebrity clan. 

Katzenberg reportedly re-iterated his stance that quality content will eventually gain notice for the platform.

Meanwhile, the service’s CEO, Meg Whitman, reportedly said, “We feel like we’ll get through this,” but urged her management staff to keep vigilant on controlling costs. 

“We feel like that will get us through,” Whitman said. “But everyone needs to really think about, are we spending money like it’s our own?”

On the surface, Quibi seems to press all the right buttons for success in the new streaming-centric entertainment world. 

It is mobile-only, because all the kids today can’t get their darn heads out of their phones. It’s cheap ($4.99 per month with ads, $7.99 without), because kids today can never find their wallets. It concentrates on short-form programming -- most of its original content lasts for 10 minutes or less -- because those same kids have no attention spans and are always watching the dang YouTube. 

It is a streaming service, and given the success of Disney+ -- which the kids seem to really like -- and others, that’s the wave of the future. And finally, it is founded by former Disney and DreamWorks chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, who isn’t a kid but in the past seemed to know what they like to watch.

The fact that Quibi launched on April 6, the height of the worldwide lockdown due to the COVID-19 pandemic, was both bane and benefit. Sure, people confined to their homes were thirsty for content and Quibi is willing to provide. But many pundits doubted that those people under lockdown were going to turn off their TVs to watch short snippets of whatever on their phones. Another setback -- Quibi doesn’t allow viewers to transfer their mobile content to their TVs, so they have to watch on the small screen no matter what.

Those doubts were confirmed during Quibi’s launch -- only 300,000 downloads of its app on the first day, and just 1.7 million downloads in the first week. In contrast, Disney+ had about 4 million downloads on its first day and had about 50 million downloads five months after its launch.

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said earlier this month that the launch exceeded expectations, telling CNBC that 80% of users who started watching a show completed the first episode, which she said pointed to strong engagement with the brand. She added that while the current focus is mobile-only, Quibi is talking with its engineers about casting programming to TVs.

“We really wanted to get it right for mobile,” she told CNBC. "We had always planned to cast to your TV, so we’ll see if we can accelerate that in the engineering roadmap. We’ll eventually get there.”

But for now, it isn't. And Quibi’s underperformance could be attributed to a lot of things. But for at least some analysts, Quibi has stumbled because it lost sight of the audience it was trying to target in the first place -- preteens and teens -- by offering them content their parents would watch.

In a research report, Barclays media analyst Kannan Venkateshwar called the Quibi download performance, “underwhelming at best,” considering it is bundled with T-Mobile for free in the U.S., is being offered with a generous 90-day free trial through April 30 and was launched when the vast amount of its audience had nothing better to do.

Related:Quibi’s Top Marketing Exec Imbres Leaves Company

But streaming success isn’t always based on logic. Take a look at Netflix. In the beginning, Netflix’s success was driven by consumers who wanted to catch up on library content of old shows, basically serving as a really, really big DVR. 

There were more reasons for Netflix to fail than to succeed, the biggest being consumer inertia. It isn’t easy to get people to change the way they consume entertainment, evident by the early pushback when Netflix first tried to change its model from a mail order DVD service to a streaming video service. What won the day was ease of use, the ability to discover shows without having to find a copy of the TV Guide and to watch them when you want to -- no more appointment TV.

Then there is the content itself. Venkateshwar noted that Katzenberg is a media veteran, having run Disney studios and co-created DreamWorks, and Whitman has a long track record as a marketing and strategic planning guru who has run Hewlett-Packard and eBay. Quibi raised $1.7 billion from a host of old school programmers like ViacomCBS, Fox, Disney, NBCUniversal and WarnerMedia.

In other words, old guys.

As an old guy myself, I find nothing wrong with this. But take a look at where some of Quibi’s programming is coming from. Established stars like Jennifer Lopez, Chrissy Tiegen and Steven Spielberg all have shows. Now, I have great respect for JLo, I think Chrissy Tiegen’s twitter feed is one of the most hilarious things online, and don’t get me started on Steven Spielberg, who has rarely produced a movie that I didn’t love (or at least like). But that’s the thing. Quibi was not created for the 56-year old trade magazine reporter demographic, as lucrative as that may sound.

And the perception that Quibi is just another attempt by the olds to show how hip they are could be a big hurdle. Do you know how I get my 14-year-old daughter to look at me in sheer, saucer-eyed terror? I utter this sentence: “Hey, how would you like to watch a bunch of shows starring people I used to watch when I was your age? In 10-minute increments.”

The short-form approach, which many have tried and failed to deliver in the past (go90, anyone?), was supposed to be a selling point for Quibi, fueled by the success of YouTube and TikTok, which also get a lot of consumption over the phone. But here again, Quibi misses the target.

According to Venkateshwar, short-form viewing on TikTok and YouTube has a disproportionately younger audience, with different tastes in content. There is a reason why the top YouTube stars are mainly comedians, gamers, make-up artists and young men who crash into walls: they’re short, sweet and you can share them and make fun of them with your friends over social media. Try doing that with a 10-minute episode of The Most Dangerous Game.

There is definitely a market for that kind of programming, but they are usually older (25-54) and may like the content but not in the “atomized form that it is presented or for consumption on the phone,” Venkateshwar wrote. “Therefore, in some ways, Quibi has chosen the worst of the two worlds – content that is tailored for legacy demos but on a distribution mechanism more attuned to younger demos without any interactivity being allowed.”

Quibi may use the same delivery method that the kids like, but again, it’s like your dad trying to get you to like his Tommy Dorsey records by blasting them 24/7 through every room in the house. There was just no way an 8-year old with Jimi Hendrix posters in his bedroom was ever going to fully appreciate swing, no matter how much he wanted that to happen. (FYI, I grew much later to like Glenn Miller).

TikTok and YouTube work in the mobile environment because they are bottoms-up social media platforms where the video works with the phone in a two-way flow, according to the Barclays analyst. TikTok and YouTube users not only create and upload content but engage with it in a way that is a lot more interactive.

“In other words, the form is the purpose when it comes to the phone,” Venkateshwar wrote. “Quibi on the other hand feels like an old media mindset being literally being squeezed into a new media form factor without any purpose.”

But maybe Quibi is beginning to realize where it needs to focus. According to an April 22 Reuters report, downloads have risen to about 2.7 million and Katzenberg has said users will get the ability to cast shows from their phones to their TVs beginning in May.

And though it’s an easy target being the newest kid on the block, Quibi isn’t alone in struggling to unlock the streaming video code. Venkateshwar even had some criticism for Disney+, adding that despite its success, it has fallen into the same “content first” trap that most streaming services do.

He did not downplay the importance of good content on a service -- The Mandalorian was a major factor in Disney+ early success. But the Barclays analyst argues that content, like technology, is a tool for engagement, which has several dimensions in the streaming business.

“We believe future streaming attempts will need a very different approach to realize their full potential vs. just creating content and putting it on the internet,” Venkateshwar wrote. He added that NBCU’s Peacock could have the greatest potential by serving as an aggregator for content creators that don’t want to spend the money building a streaming service, but want to participate in large scale streaming economics.

In that way, Peacock could be more like what the analyst envisioned for another streaming service Hulu, which has become a defacto “adult Disney+” as a vehicle for racier programming in the Disney library, rather than the content aggregator Venkateshwar had hoped. The analyst has lamented that Disney did not see Hulu as an Amazon for content, offering Disney fare as well as content from ESPN+, Netflix and HBO Max through a single interface. He also wondered why Hulu couldn’t be a transactional platform for Disney, much like Amazon is currently for theatrical content released online during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“In that respect, Peacock can in some ways become the version of Hulu we envisaged earlier but even more useful for consumers by aggregating local content relevant to audiences in various markets thereby allowing advertisers also to engage more effectively with consumers,” Venkateshwar wrote.

So whether Quibi manages to squeeze out a niche, or it gets overwhelmed by the onslaught of OTT offerings that are there and are yet to come, will be left up to a traditionally fickle demographic. Quibi will continue cranking out short form programming -- it launched with 50 new shows and has said it will end the year with 8,500 episodes across 175 shows. But just like my dad and those damn Tommy Dorsey records, just because you can doesn't mean you should. 

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said the Quibi app was dowloaded 1.7 million times in its first week, representing “one of the most successful launches of a completely new brand and a completely new app.”

Declaring Quibi’s tally in an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Monday morning, Whitman’s number was significantly greater than one also released this morning by tracking firm Apptopia, which counted 1.15 million Quibi app downloads.

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“It turns out people have in-between moments at home, in-between Zoom calls, in-between wrangling the kids, in-between taking care of the house and things like that. We don’t actually think [the pandemic] hurt us. We’re delighted by the launch,” Whitman said.

Whitman conceded that when COVID-19 hit, the company had to make “a whole host of changes” to its launch strategy. Among the most notable, she said, was to establish a 90-day free trial period. After the 90 days, users will be charged $4.99 for a version with ads and $7.99-a month for an ad-free version.

“There will certainly be belt-tightening. It’s impossible to predict. But I think the fact that this is mobile-only, very personalized and relatively inexpensive I think will stand us in good stead,” Whitman noted.

She also noted that Quibi is largely immune to the current impact to the ad market, given that it’s sold out its first-year inventory. “We’re set until April of next year,” Whitman said.

At CES, Whitman valued that first-year haul at $153 million. Quibi has raised $1.75 billion in private funding.

She added that the median Quibi user is in their mid-thirties, and that 80% of users who initiate a 10-minute-or-less Quibi series episode finish the installment.

Whitman’s public statement’s probably couldn’t come soon enough, given that the narrative on Quibi’s launch week has been largely spun—perhaps unfairly—negative.

As The Verge noted, analysts had been expecting first-week downloads in the range of 1 million to 1.5 million.

Related: Tough First Day? Quibi Generates Only 300K App Downloads, Gets Battered by Critics

Research company Sensor Tower reported 300,000 app downloads on the first day for Quibi, April 6, inspiring a number of media outlets to compare the service—which is intended for use only on mobile phones—to the highly successful Disney Plus and its 4 million first-day app downloads. .

Not only is Disney Plus a lean-back OTT experience designed for living room consumption, it’s built on the backbone of very established, very popular entertainment brands like Star Wars and Marvel.

In his interview with Next TV in early March, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former Disney executive, took pains to differentiate Quibi from Disney Plus, noting that the former is a new brand targeted to adult consumers featuring mostly new intellectual property.

Related: Katzenberg on Quibi: 'If You Make It and It's Good, They Will Come'

Quibi, which doesn’t have an OTT app, or support for AirPlay or Chromecast, caught flack from users who wanted to port Quibi video on to their living-room TVs.

“We had always planned to be able to cast to your TV, so we’re going to see if we can accelerate that in the engineering roadmap,” Whitman said on CNBC. “We’ll eventually get there, but it was never a part of the launch. If we had known about COVID, maybe it would have been.”

Meanwhile, critics were hard on the service, as well, as they reviewed content meant for viewing in short bursts in public places in quarantined, very traditional circumstances.

That outlook could change. Quibi—which launched with 50 original shows and just announced the debut of seven new shows this morning—has banked a big supply of original content that will keep rolling out over the course of the late-spring and summer. Perhaps there’s a Mandalorian-style breakout hit in there somewhere?

“We feel great we have enough content to last us now through November, and this is important because all of Hollywood is shut down like the rest of the country, and we’ll see how our users consume,” Whitman said.

Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said the Quibi app was dowloaded 1.7 million times in its first week, representing “one of the most successful launches of a completely new brand and a completely new app.”

Declaring Quibi’s tally in an appearance on CNBC’s Squawk on the Street Monday morning, Whitman’s number was significantly greater than one also released this morning by tracking firm Apptopia, which counted 1.15 million Quibi app downloads. 

“It turns out people have in-between moments at home, in-between Zoom calls, in-between wrangling the kids, in between taking care of the house and things like that. We don’t actually think [the pandemic] hurt us. We’re delighted by the launch,” Whitman said. 

Whitman conceded that when COVID-19 hit, the company had to make “a whole host of changes” to its launch strategy. Among the most notable, she said, was to establish a 90-day free trial period. After the 90 days, users will be charged $4.99 for a version with ads and $7.99-a month for an ad-free version. 

“There will certainly be belt-tightening. It’s impossible to predict. But I think the fact that this is mobile-only, very personalized and relatively inexpensive I think will stand us in good stead,” Whitman noted. 

She also noted that Quibi is largely immune to the current impact to the ad market, given that it’s sold out its first-year inventory. “We’re set until April of next year,” Whitman said. 

At CES, Whitman valued that first-year haul at $153 million. Quibi has raised $1.75 billion in private funding. 

She added that the median Quibi user is in their mid-thirties, and that 80% of users who initiate a 10-minute-or-less Quibi series episode finish the installment. 

Whitman’s public statement’s probably couldn’t come soon enough, given that the narrative on Quibi’s launch week has been largely spun—perhaps unfairly—negative. 

As The Verge noted, analysts had been expecting first-week downloads in the range of 1 million to 1.5 million. 

Also read: Tough First Day? Quibi Generates Only 300K App Downloads, Gets Battered by Critics

Research company Sensor Tower reported 300,000 app downloads on the first day for Quibi, April 6, inspiring a number of media outlets to compare the service—which is intended for use only on mobile phones—to the highly successful Disney Plus and its 4 million first-day app downloads. .

Not only is Disney Plus a lean-back OTT experience designed for living room consumption, it’s built on the backbone of very established, very popular entertainment brands like Star Wars and Marvel. 

In his interview with Next TV in early March, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, a former Disney executive, took pains to differentiate Quibi from Disney Plus, noting that the former is a new brand targeted to adult consumers featuring mostly new intellectual property. 

Also read: Katzenberg on Quibi: 'If You Make It and It's Good, They Will Come'

Quibi, which doesn’t have an OTT app, or support for AirPlay or Chromecast, caught flack from users who wanted to port Quibi video on to their living-room TVs.

“We had always planned to be able to cast to your TV, so we’re going to see if we can accelerate that in the engineering roadmap,” Whitman said on CNBC. “We’ll eventually get there, but it was never a part of the launch. If we had known about COVID, maybe it would have been.”

Meanwhile, critics were hard on the service, as well, as they reviewed content meant for viewing in short bursts in public places in quarantined, very traditional circumstances. 

That outlook could change. Quibi—which launched with 50 original shows and just announced the debut of seven new shows this morning—has banked a big supply of original content that will keep rolling out over the course of the late-spring and summer. Perhaps there’s a Mandalorian-style breakout hit in there somewhere?

“We feel great we have enough content to last us now through November, and this is important because all of Hollywood is shut down like the rest of the country, and we’ll see how our users consume,” Whitman said.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s big gamble that a streaming service targeted to mobile video consumption has yet to be proven a winner. But big companies continue to bet on the venture known as Quibi.

The startup’s CEO, Meg Whitman, told The Wall Street Journal that Quibi has raised another $750 million. The funding, she said, includes the $400 million the company secured at the end of 2019. Whitman didn’t specify who the investors in this round were.

Can Quibi Build a Brand From Scratch Amid Stiff Streaming Competition?

Added to the $1 billion Quibi raised at launch in 2018 from investors including Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Holding Corp. Ltd. and the major Hollywood studios, and it’s been privately funded to the total sum of $1.75 billion.

Quibi also announced at CES in early January that it sold out its initial advertising inventory of $153 million, with sponsors including Walmart, Google and PepsiCo buying in.

CES 2020: Quibi Looks for More Successful Drive While Going 90

“We always have to remember it’s a new brand, a new product offering, a new technology platform,” Whitman told the WSJ. “We just want to make sure we have the financial flexibility and runway to build a long-term business.”

Quibi will launch April 6 with about 50 short-form series in the can (around 175 shows, comprising about 8,500 episodes have been announced). Quibi is touting big name after big name in its producer ranks. Just a few of the well-knowns revealed in its big CES presentation included Steven Spielberg, Ben Stiller, Keifer Sutherland, Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Chrissy Teigen, Lorne Michaels, Sam Raimi and Antoine Fuqua.

Verizon famously floundered in its bid to launch a mobile-first streaming service called Go90 in 2015. Verizon reportedly spent more than $1.2 billion on the initiative. Pundits chalked up its floundering to the notion that even millennial-aged consumers don’t want to watch video on smart phones.

For his part, Katzenberg and Quibi seem to be more influenced by the success of YouTube, which generated $15.5 billion in advertising sales in 2019, much of it based on mobile video consumption.

Quibi is banking on the belief that short form video—chapter-length episodes of no more than 10 minutes in run time—tailored specifically for the mobile format, crafted by the best of makers, will be the difference for Quibi.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s big gamble that a streaming service targeted to mobile video consumption has yet to be proven a winner. But big companies continue to bet on the venture known as Quibi.

The startup’s CEO, Meg Whitman, told The Wall Street Journal that Quibi has raised another $750 million. The funding, she said, includes the $400 million the company secured at the end of 2019. Whitman didn’t specify who the investors in this round were.

Can Quibi Build a Brand From Scratch Amid Stiff Streaming Competition?

Added to the $1 billion Quibi raised at launch in 2018 from investors including Chinese conglomerate Alibaba Holding Corp. Ltd. and the major Hollywood studios, and it’s been privately funded to the total sum of $1.75 billion.  

Quibi also announced at CES in early January that it sold out its initial advertising inventory of $153 million, with sponsors including Walmart, Google and PepsiCo buying in. 

CES 2020: Quibi Looks for More Successful Drive While Going 90

“We always have to remember it’s a new brand, a new product offering, a new technology platform,” Whitman told the WSJ. “We just want to make sure we have the financial flexibility and runway to build a long-term business.”

Quibi will launch April 6 with about 50 short-form series in the can (around 175 shows, comprising about 8,500 episodes have been announced). Quibi is touting big name after big name in its producer ranks. Just a few of the well-knowns revealed in its big CES presentation included Steven Spielberg, Ben Stiller, Keifer Sutherland, Idris Elba, Kevin Hart, Chrissy Teigen, Lorne Michaels, Sam Raimi and Antoine Fuqua.

Verizon famously floundered in its bid to launch a mobile-first streaming service called Go90 in 2015. Verizon reportedly spent more than $1.2 billion on the initiative. Pundits chalked up its floundering to the notion that even millennial-aged consumers don’t want to watch video on smart phones. 

For his part, Katzenberg and Quibi seem to be more influenced by the success of YouTube, which generated $15.5 billion in advertising sales in 2019, much of it based on mobile video consumption.

Quibi is banking on the belief that short form video—chapter-length episodes of no more than 10 minutes in run time—tailored specifically for the mobile format, crafted by the best of makers, will be the difference for Quibi.

Jeffrey Katzenberg’s mobile-first, short-form programming venture Quibi will launch in April 2020, the founder said, with its initial 7,000 individual pieces of content including contributions from Steven Spielberg and Steven Soderbergh.

Those were some of the disclosures made by Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman over the weekend, with the pair appearing at the Producers Guild of America’s “Produced By” event on the Warner Bros. lot in Burbank, Calif. (The event was covered by Screen Daily and the major Hollywood trades.)

WarnerMedia, Disney, Sony Pictures and Liberty Global are just a few of the big media and telecom backers of Katezenberg’s startup, which has gathered around $1 billion in venture capital so far, according to Crunchbase.

Calling Quibi “the next great growth opportunity for producers, for story tellers, for the entire ecosystem of Hollywood,” Katzenberg and Whitman said Quibi plans to spend around $1 billion to acquire its content, and will soon add another $500,000 of investment capital.

Related: Katezenberg, Whitman Reveal Sub Price, Launch Date for New Mobile First Platform

The service, they said, will be launched withe a $470 million first-year marketing budget and will be offered to consumers at $4.99 a month, or $7.99 for an ad-free version.

In addition to the business details, Katzenberg and Whitman also discussed the powerhouse creative talent associated with the venture—this not only includes newly announced partnerships with Spielberg and Soderbergh, but also filmmakers including Jason Blum, Doug Liman and Antoine Fuqua.

Katzenberg said Spielberg wants his Spielberg After Dark to be aimed at folks ages 25-35 and playable only on a smart phone that is able to confirm that it is dark outside before it will let the show play.

A new short-form chapter will be released each weekday. “We look at this not as short form, but long form in chapters,” Katzenberg said. 

NewTV, the mobile-first programming platform being launched by movie mogul Jeffrey Katzenberg and former Hewlett-Packard chief executive Meg Whitman, will launch sometime around late-2019/early-2020 with a subscription price of $5 a month, $8 a month without ads.

The revelations were made Tuesday by Whitman and Katzenberg, presenting at a Santa Barbara, Calif. investor conference organized by AT&T’s WarnerMedia division. (The event was covered by Variety.)

Simultaneously, NewTV confirmed that former US Weekly and Hollywood Reporter editor Janice Min has joined its team.

“So YES, you can assume there will be news programming (Hollywood, political and more),” Min tweeted, including a photo of her being flanked by Whitman and Katzenberg. 

NewTV expects to launch with a a collection of premium short-form video series, with each episode running around 10 minutes or less in length.

“There are multiple ‘ in between’ moments over the course of your day,” during which these short episodes could be enjoyable to consumers, Katzenberg told investors.

The platform is being developed by Katzenberg’s WnderCo, which recently revealed that it has secured $1 billion in seed funding from investors including NBCUniversal, Disney, 21st Century Fox, Sony Pictures and Viacom, among others.