In a pandemic world, video app Quibi falls flat
LOS ANGELES — Jeffrey Katzenberg hasn’t left his Beverly Hills home in nearly 50 days.
Deprived of a frenetic schedule that, before the coronavirus pandemic, typically meant three breakfast meetings, three lunch meetings and a working dinner, the veteran executive has filled his days with what he calls “Zoom-a-roo” videoconferences as he tries to rejigger Quibi, the streaming app he started with Meg Whitman a little more than a month ago.
Downloads have been anemic, despite a lineup that includes producers and stars like Jennifer Lopez, LeBron James, Idris Elba, Steven Spielberg and Chrissy Teigen.
The service, which offers entertainment and news programs in five- to 10-minute chunks, was designed to be watched on the go by people who are too busy to sit down and stream TV shows or movies. It came out when millions of people were not going anywhere because of stay-athome orders across the country.
“I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus,” Katzenberg said in a video interview. “Everything. But we own it.”
Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Even with a free 90-day trial, the app has been installed by only 2.9 million customers, according to Sensor Tower. Quibi says the figure is more like 3.5 million. Of those who have installed the app, the company says 1.3 million are active users.
“Is it the avalanche of people that we wanted and were going for out of launch?” Katzenberg said. “The answer is no. It’s not up to what we wanted. It’s not close to what we wanted.”
Katzenberg, 69, the onetime head of Walt Disney Studios, and Whitman, 63, the former HewlettPackard chief, raised nearly $1.8 billion from Hollywood studios and Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba for Quibi. They pitched it as an app designed to match how people consumed media now — on their phones during slow moments, while they commuted or waited in line. Conditions were much different on the day it came out.
“My hope, my belief was that there would still be many in-between moments while sheltering in place,” Katzenberg said. “There are still those moments, but it’s not the same. It’s out of sync.”
As Zoom and TikTok top the app charts, Katzenberg and other Quibi executives have been working on reducing their projections from the 7 million users and $250 million in subscriber revenue they had estimated for Quibi’s first year. With television and film production shut down almost entirely, Quibi has also decided to slow the pace of its new releases so it will be able to offer fresh content until the start of 2021.