Quibi Raised $1.75 Billion and Shut Down Six Months After Launch

Jeffrey Katzenberg, fresh from running DreamWorks Animation, started raising money for Quibi in 2018. The pitch was tight: premium scripted entertainment, episodes capped at ten minutes, designed for vertical viewing on a phone, sold by subscription. Disney, Sony, Warner, and Lionsgate put in. So did Alibaba, Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan, the Chinese sovereign wealth fund, and seven of the eight major Hollywood studios. Meg Whitman, formerly of HP and eBay, signed on as CEO. By launch, Quibi had raised about $1.75 billion.

The service launched on April 6, 2020. Three weeks earlier, the United States had begun shutting down for the pandemic. Quibi had been designed for the commuting middle-class — short episodes for the bus, the train, the line at Starbucks. The commute was gone. So was the gym. And the airport.

The app's design choices made the timing worse. Quibi's signature 'Turnstyle' technology let viewers rotate the phone to switch between landscape and portrait shots filmed simultaneously. The feature was a technical achievement and an answer to a question no one had asked. Casting on a TV was deliberately blocked at launch — the company believed the format depended on intimacy with a single screen — and they reversed the decision two months later, after subscribers complained.

Free trials converted poorly. By the time Whitman and Katzenberg announced the shutdown on October 21, 2020, paying subscribers numbered well below the projected ten million. The company sent the residual cash back to investors and sold the content library to Roku in January 2021 for under $100 million. Roku quietly relaunched the shows as the free Roku Channel's 'Roku Originals' tier, which is where most viewers eventually saw The Most Dangerous Game with Liam Hemsworth — Quibi's flagship show.