The objective was to unseat Netflix and everyone bet on it Movie stars awardwinning producers gigantic companies cuttingedge technology A new competitor was ready to compete for the crown with the king of new television and had decided to bypass Amazon Prime HBO and Disney Plus to get it
But Quibi knew he was entering the race with an injury so severe it seemed fatal So it was Six months later the company pulled down the blind Its managers blamed the pandemic But among the reasons for failure experts add price communication and lack of vision This was Quibis journey in the complex streaming market
The proposal was risky and thats why it attracted attention Its founder Jeffrey Katzenberg former Disney CEO and founder of DreamWorks entered the streaming marketwith highquality content produced by renowned directors and producers performed by renowned artists exclusively adapted to consume from mobile phones and with a duration of 10 minutes per episode
Katzenberg was looking to create the next generation of storytellers and this seemed like the formula for success Its platform would be ideal to fill those empty spaces or dead times of the day such as the trip on public transport a gap between work meetings or in the waiting room of the consultation
But all the material could only be consumed from the mobile No computers big screens or tablets
Quibi was a great idea and if you consult the market data by 2021 the average user will spend 100 minutes a day consuming video from their mobile the proposal was good says Elena Neira professor and researcher specializing in new audiovisual distribution models and author of Streaming Wars which explains the phenomenon of the new television
In the Quibi case it was not enough to hold onto the data it had to be interpreted Mobile is the future yes But their great competition beyond the streaming giants were TikTok and YouTube and both have something that Quibi did not offer they are free he details
For Jorge de Soto Art director for film and television and professor of Audiovisual Communication at the University of Villanueva the mobile was the main problem They forgot that the most important thing is to have good stories to tell regardless of their format he tells EL PAÍS by email
Katzenbergs project went ahead and raised nearly € 15 billion from investors like NBC Universal WarnerMedia and ATT among others PepsiCo and Walmart signed up within their ranks of advertisers
Producers and directors of the stature of Steven Soderbergh Guillermo del Toro Steven Spielberg and Sam Raimi began to elaborate some of the content Some of the older ones were on his side After two years Quibi saw the light on April 6 and in the middle of the pandemic
It is lack of vision If your product was created to be consumed during the daily hustle and bustle of people moving from one place to another why would you launch it in the middle of a pandemic when everyone is confined to home
That in addition to the confinement its content failed because nobody spoke of it and it did not generate trends Nicolás Grijalba professor of Film History and director of the Degree in Audiovisual Communication at Nebrija University agrees with the expert
It is true that being born in the middle of a pandemic does not seem like a good plan but in addition to that neither its catalog was too attractive nor the brand managed to generate a hook with the viewer he explains
