A Quick Bite Post Mortem For For Quibi: Hollywood Still Doesn't Get The Internet

from the it-ain't-about-the-content dept

So Quibi, the Hollywood dream of creating a new "professional" video streaming service by throwing $1.75 billion at Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and hoping they could create something, lasted all of 199 days before announcing that it was throwing in the towel (even though it apparently still has a chunk of that cash on hand, which it will be handing back to some investors). As we noted when it launched, Quibi is the perfect example of Hollywood thinking about the internet. It overvalued the content (and believed that you got the best content by throwing money at big names), and completely undervalued the internet and the fact that the killer application of the internet is community and communication.

For decades now, we've pointed out time and time again that Hollywood seems to view the internet through the lens of their existing industry -- one built up with a few giant gatekeepers who "greenlight" what content gets made -- and that the content they pick must be financed with ungodly sums of money. I'm reminded of the former NBC exec who quizzed me years ago about how to make sure his company could keep making $200 million movies. As I've noted repeatedly in the 15 years since I was challenged over that, the whole question is wrong. No one in the tech industry demands that others explain "how do we keep making $5,000 computers." The industry looks at how best to serve customers -- and often looks for creative ways to do it cheaper and more efficiently, rather than just setting a cost and tossing cash into it.

Quibi was the result of this kind of hubris: taking the Hollywood approach to an internet world. And it showed.

As James Surowiecki highlights in his own post-mortem, Quibi is basically the opposite of what a compelling internet service is because it relies on the idea of the brilliant visionary anointing the best content, rather than letting it bubble up via the wisdom of the crowds.

I find it notable that Quibi shut down the week that there was a flood of stories (and TV commercials) featuring Nathan Apodaca, the Idaho potato farmer who's random TikTok video of himself on a skateboarding heading into work (after his truck broke down) while drinking cranberry juice from a giant bottle and singling along to Fleetwood Mac went super viral. It was also a "quick bite" video, but it was basically the anti-Quibi. That one random video going viral has even brought Fleetwood Mac's "Dreams" back onto the charts 43 years after the song came out.

That's the power of the internet. It allows anyone to create. It allows anyone to share. And out of all of that, it allows some amazing content to bubble up, because tons of people like it -- and not because some super rich Hollywood dude decides "this is what the people want."

Filed Under: broadcast, communication, community, content, hollywood, internet, jeffrey katzenberg, meg whitman, sharing, value
Companies: quibi

Jeffrey Katzenberg's Ego Decides That COVID-19 Must Be Why Quibi Totally Sucks And No One Wants It

from the yeah,-sure,-jeff,-that's-it dept

A few weeks back, we went into detail on why Quibi was such a total disaster from Day 1, which can pretty much be summed up by the fact that Hollywood thinks the way you build something people want is to throw tons of money at it (and fudge the books on the back end), while refusing to understand that getting people to actually like what you want -- by making it convenient and building community -- matters. Hollywood overvalues throwing money at big name content makers, and completely ignores the tech, community, and social side of things. And Quibi just makes that whole thing abundantly clear.

However, as Quibi sinks further and further away from relevance, and gets closer and closer to a footnote in a future "whatever happened to....?" story, the mastermind behind the clusterfuck, Jeffrey Katzenberg (formerly of Disney and Dreamworks), has decided that, no, no, the blame belongs entirely with the COVID-19 pandemic, and not with anything that he or his team did wrong:

“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Mr. Katzenberg said in a video interview. “Everything. But we own it.”

If you attribute everything to the pandemic then no, Jeff, you don't own it. And, things do not look good at all:

Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock’em All and the language-learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower.

Either way, the idea that pandemic lockdown would reduce demand for Quibi seems like a convenient excuse -- given that plenty of people have more time on their hands, and basically every other streaming service saw traffic go up, often significantly since the pandemic began.

Katzenberg's nonsense excuse is that he and his Hollywood pals designed Quibi to be used for the "downtime" between life -- like for standing in line or during commutes, and there's less commuting and standing in line right now. But... that seems like pure wishful thinking, especially since other types of "quick bite" content have seen their numbers go up. The NY Times reporter asks Katzenberg about TikTok, which also focuses on very short "quick bites" of video content, and whose usage has also continued to increase during lockdown, and Katzenberg seems to explode at her:

“That’s like comparing apples to submarines,” he said. “I don’t know what people are expecting from us. What did Netflix look like 30 days after it launched? To tell me about a company that has a billion users and is doing great in the past six weeks, I’m happy for them, but what the hell does it have to do with me?”

Hey, look, if the submarines and the apples are targeting the same market -- viewer attention for video content in quick bites -- then, uh, it seems to matter quite a bit. But, I guess when you don't want to admit that you're completely flopping, denying the competition is the competition is one strategy. Not a good one, mind you, but it is one strategy.

Katzenberg does note that Quibi will finally start to do the kinds of things that it should have done from the beginning, like not forcing you to only watch from your phone and (gasp) letting people make screenshots and share them:

Mr. Katzenberg and Ms. Whitman have backpedaled on their original commitment to a smartphone-only app. This week, Quibi subscribers who have iPhones will be able to watch movies-in-chapters like “Most Dangerous Game” and shows like “Chrissy’s Court” on TV screens. (Android users will have to wait a few more weeks.)

Also coming soon, Mr. Katzenberg said: Quibi will be less walled off from the internet, and users will be able to share its content on social media platforms.

But, of course, even there, Katzenberg plays down the importance of these kinds of things, suggesting that Quibi got this all "mostly right" and they're just fixing a few small issues, ignoring that these few small issues were the kinds of things that make or break an internet product.

“There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right,” he said, “but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, ‘Uh-oh, we didn’t see that.’”

It's one thing not to see a unique product feature that might be nice, but not realizing that community and sharing would be important is not a small miss. That's pretty much the ballgame for a new consumer service these days. Katzenberg, though, has that traditional Hollywood broadcast mind of "we, the rich and powerful, make the content, and you the lowly public consumes the content." But that's not what people want and it's not want people have wanted in ages -- and it's why Hollywood keeps getting this wrong over and over again.

Filed Under: blame, covid-19, hollywood, jeffrey katzenberg, streaming
Companies: quibi

Quibi Is What Happens When Hollywood Overvalues Content And Undervalues Community

from the how-are-you-doing-fellow-kids dept

As you may have heard (and may still being bombarded by ads for) recently, a new video streaming service called Quibi launched to much fanfare. The fanfare was not around the technology or the content, mind you, but around the fact that there were some famous people involved (namely: former Disney/Dreamworks exec Jeffrey Katzenberg and, to a lesser extent, former eBay/HP CEO Meg Whitman -- who had been a Disney and Dreamworks exec earlier) and the ridiculous fact that the company raised nearly $2 billion before it even had launched. There was some buzz about it leading up to launch... but mostly from the media which always falls for the story of the company that raises a ton of money and has some famous person in charge.

So far, however, Quibi appears to be yet another example of a point I made about Hollywood and the internet over a decade ago: entertainment execs have a long history of overvaluing the content and undervaluing users and what they want. Sometimes I've described this as overvaluing content and undervaluing technology (which plays into the whole Hollywood/Silicon Valley divide), but it's actually something different than that, which is ably shown by the complete dumpster fire that Quibi has been so far. They spent silly amounts of money on content, and then seemed to focus the "technology" money on a completely pointless and weird setup where the orientation of your devices changes what you see (that is, if you hold your phone in portrait orientation, what you see is not just a scrunched up landscape mode, but something different). That seems like the kind of thing that a bunch of out-of-touch execs would sit around and brainstorm without any understanding whatsoever of how real people use devices. At best it seems like an attempt to try again with Verizon's brain-dead Go90 service that no one ever used.

And, so far Quibi's living down to expectations. Within a week of its launch, things were not looking good:

After a quick moment in the spotlight, Quibi has tanked in the US iPhone app rankings.

The streaming app had a strong debut last week as the fourth most downloaded iPhone app, but quickly fell in the rankings. Yesterday, it dropped out of the top 50, and today it's the 71st most popular app in the US, according to data from analytics firm App Annie.

Quibi is now less popular than Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, and Amazon Prime Video among US iPhone users. It's also ranked below an ASMR Slicing app, the Calm meditation app, and the Roku app that functions as a TV remote.

Ouch.

And it's never a good sign when your head of marketing quits two weeks after launch... in the midst of a global pandemic.

Hell, even the content -- which, again, was supposed to be central to Quibi's strategy, and which they threw a ton of money at -- isn't wowing anyone:

The app itself functions as promised. The shows, though, are a mess. Quibi shows all share a few qualities: They’re short, with episode run times under ten minutes. Short doesn’t have to mean chintzy or trivial, but Quibi shows almost universally feel cheaper and less memorable than similar stuff on other platforms. The Quibi shows that are meant to seem like TV shows do feel like TV shows (Run This Town, Shape of Pasta, Murder House Flip), but their compressed run times and thoughtless cinematography just remind you of how much better they could be if they were TV shows. Camera angles and scene edits look identical to the visual design of a typical TV show, full of panning cameras and long shots, and it’s seemingly meant to signal that “this is a serious, expensive TV show!” Instead, it signals that no one’s put much effort into thinking about what this should look like when played in a vertical format on a phone. The Quibi shows that seem closest to YouTube series (Dishmantled, Gayme Show, Memory Hole) fare better, but even those feel half-hearted, all shell and no inner oomph. The worst are the movies, like When the Streetlights Go On or Most Dangerous Game, which Quibi advertises as “movies in chapters.” In their widescreen cinematography, the beats of each scene, the way they’ve been awkwardly crammed into tiny chunks, I swear you can still hear them screaming, “I’m a movie!” even as Quibi shovels dirt over their short-form-mobile-storytelling graves.

Meanwhile, almost everything that Quibi has done suggests that they really don't understand how to build a modern internet service, which starts and ends with building up a supportive community. Instead, Quibi seems to have taken some of their way-too-large-bank-account and focused on pissing off the few people who like what they do. First, they added some dumb DRM to stop people from taking screenshots (one of a few ways that content goes viral these days):

Quibi was designed from the ground up to be a mobile experience. A big part of what people do with their phones is share. They share photos from their lives on TikTok, information with strangers on Twitter, and swap memes with people on Facebook. Quibi wants to be part of that mobile universe. But by disabling the ability to let people share what they’re seeing, it has shut down a core experience that comes with being on our phones. For a self-proclaimed game-changing mobile experience, it isn’t very mobile-friendly.

Indeed, the inability to create any kind of meme-ification of Quibi content seems to be a recognition by Quibi execs that their content just isn't very good. As Kathryn VanArendonk wrote at Vulture: Let Me Screenshot Your Quibi Show, Cowards:

Screenshots, memes, GIFs, and other small excerpts are essentially forms of quotation. They act as shareable pieces of larger works, sometimes with the goal of illuminating the work they come from, but often getting cut away from their original contexts, sent out into the world to stand on their own and gather their own meanings. GIFs are the most common out-of-context excerpts of longer video works, so expressive and self-sufficient that they can communicate an idea without carrying along any of their original framework. Screenshots can function the same way, often speaking more toward the context in which they’re being deployed than referencing the original work. They become their own form of language, but as they circulate and accrete new meanings, they also make the images, reactions, stories, and personalities from the original work more familiar, more of a bedrock part of cultural discourse. Carole Baskin’s “Hey all you cool cats and kittens!” line quickly became a reference to Tiger King, for instance, but it’s also accrued its own implications separate from the show — it’s a weird greeting, an awkwardly mannered way to start speaking, a intro with just a touch of self-awareness and also not nearly enough social awareness.

And then... apparently Quibi has money to spare on lawyers, rather than people who actually understand the internet, because they actually sent a cease-and-desist letter to what might be the only podcast that likes Quibi:

Rob Dezendorf and Danielle Gibson started a show formerly called Quibiverse, a fan space to discuss the various “quick bite” content offered by the new streamer. However, the creators say that after 17 episodes, they were sent a cease-and-desist. Per Dezendoorf: “They were like, ‘Well, you can’t use the name Quibi, you can’t tell anyone that you’re about Quibi, you can talk about Quibi, but no one can know through your title and you can’t have any artwork that resembles our stuff.’” Gibson added: “It just felt so surreal to get a cease-and-desist from a billion-dollar company, about our fan podcast, in the midst of a global health crisis.”

In the end, Quibi looks like it may be heading in the same direction as other such ideas that throw a lot of money at streaming content without actually understanding what makes an internet service work (such as a community of fans). As Paul Tassi at Forbes recently wrote, Quibi seems destined to be the service that everyone's heard of and no one uses:

And yet, since Quibi’s launch during the pandemic lockdown, I have had zero, actual organic conversation about the service with…anyone.

None of my real-life friends have even heard of it, unless they’ve been mildly annoyed by the ads like I’ve been, but none are watching. The only people on my social media channels that have seen any Quibi shows are entertainment journalists where it’s quite literally their job to watch and report back what they find.

It's sad how frequently this sort of thing happens, and it would be better if Hollywood didn't always rush into things assuming it knows best (especially about technology) and assuming that all you need to do is throw a lot of money at content to make an internet service.

Filed Under: community, content, hollywood, jeffrey katzenberg, meg whitman, overvalue, streaming video, technology, value
Companies: quibi