Quibi raised $1.75 billion and secured a roster of A-list talent, but it can’t get audiences to notice

It amazes me just how off the mark Quibi seems to be. The spent billions of dollars to recruit Hollywood actors and top-tier directors to produce high-quality shows that are meant to be watched on a phone in 10 minute chunks. There is also no way to screenshot or share the videos to other services so it is impossible for any of these works to go viral. It is like Katzenberg and the others behind this effort have never interacted with anyone under the age of 40 or know how people use social media or the phone on the go.

I am sure there are probably some good movies and shows on the platform, but I am not going to pay $5 a month for something like this to only watch on my phone when I have Reddit, Twitter, Youtube, and TikTok available for free and able to be consumed in much smaller chunks of time.

I love this paragraph that just shows how monumentally they failed in this effort.

Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, Quibi’s CEO, attributed the slow start in part to the pandemic. T-Mobile, Quibi’s most important launch partner, could hardly flex its marketing muscle when most stores were closed. The “on the go” users the app was meant to capture were now stuck at home. Of the 40 million newly unemployed, a disproportionate number are the young digital natives Quibi is trying to reach. But plenty of streaming companies have seen the stay-at-home orders as a boon: Instagram Live is surging, and mobile-phone use is up, with shocked iPhone users posting screen-time reports graphing dramatic spikes. It’s easy to imagine users of a new, bite-size video app sitting in bed at night gorging on mouthfuls of fresh content.

While people are spending more time than ever on their phone, tiktok is exploding with millennials, people are streaming more than ever, yet this service is flopping hard.

I also just don't understand where the marketing for this is. Literally the only other time I have heard of Quibi is from the Some More News episode that @micycle_the_bichael linked in their comment here. How did they get almost $2 billion from investors and not line up any promotion for this app and its shows?

Article talks about a lot of the reasons Quibi is failing, here's a funny video that digs into all that and more:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ihFePUknSIc