Quibi

What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.

Originated 2018 · Los Angeles, as a mobile phone app launched in the United States and Canada in April 2020 · Also known as NewTV; Quick Bites

What it is

Quibi was a paid app for watching short television shows on a mobile phone. Every episode was under 10 minutes long, and the shows were made by Hollywood studios with famous actors in them. Its main gimmick, called Turnstyle, let you turn the phone sideways or upright and the picture would reframe itself to fit. It cost about $5 a month with adverts or $8 without, and it ran for less than eight months in 2020.

Where it came from

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the film executive behind DreamWorks Animation, founded it in Los Angeles in August 2018 under the name NewTV. Meg Whitman, who had run eBay and Hewlett-Packard, was chief executive. The name came from "quick bites". In total it raised $1.75 billion from Disney, NBCUniversal, Sony, banks and others, and it advertised during the 2020 Super Bowl. It launched on 6 April 2020, a few weeks into American lockdowns, when the commutes and queues it was designed for had stopped. It announced its closure on 21 October and shut on 1 December 2020.

Why it mattered

It was the clearest case of old Hollywood money misreading how people watched video on phones. Young people were already watching short videos on TikTok and YouTube for free, made by ordinary users who shared them everywhere. Quibi asked them to pay for polished mini TV shows that were hard to share. The size of the loss made the story easy to tell: $1.75 billion raised and gone within a year of launch. Its shows were sold to Roku in January 2021, reportedly for under $100 million. Quibi became shorthand for an expensive launch no one asked for.

What noah thinks it shows about us

People online loved watching powerful companies fail in public, and Quibi's huge budget made it ideal for that. It also showed that on phones, sharing was the main appeal: a service people couldn't easily clip and post had nothing to spread except the story of its own failure.

Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.