Quibi shutting down for good around December 1st
Not news, but news to me. Whether you had fun with Quibi or not, it’s going away on December 1st after blowing a couple billion dollars on content, tech, and advertising.
I watched Dummy (which was pretty funny,) and their remake of The Fugitive (which was cringeworthy,) and was left to the realization that this format was not for me. The bite sized episodes were not my thing, and with the ability to pause and resume Netflix and literally every other streaming service out there, this didn’t seem like a particularly compelling idea to me.
Then again, I wasn’t the target and I’m still not particularly sure who the target was. Yet another streaming service but without a giant catalog of movies and content seemed to be a looming obstacle as well as only being able to watch on your phone at launch seemed… very very not adoptable. Eh, whatever.
That it’s going away, two billion dollars in and under a year, surprises me. It seems like a service that should be able to rent some bandwidth and server power on demand and just stick around one way or another without burning through cash until the end of time when like Yahoo Groups you get an email one day informing you that it 1) existed until now, 2) is shutting down. Maybe make some content deals for their flipping orientation tech so you get information on demand like on Amazon Prime.
[Variety]
