It’s over: According to The Wall Street Journal, Quibi Holdings LLC is finally shuttering after only six months, making it the shortest living streaming service to date. This comes after a weeks-long, last ditch effort to garner additional backers, lure new meme enthusiasts with new features, and outright sell the company to the highest bidder. We’d say we’re shocked, but we—like everyone else—have been paying attention.
Per WSJ, Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg began informing investors of the decision on Wednesday (a conversation made considerably more uncomfortable by the fact that he and CEO Meg Whitman raised an astonishing $1.75 billion for seed money). The company also enlisted the services of a reconstruction firm to help them determine their other options, to no avail. There’s no word on what will happen to all the costly, now-displaced content, (including the recent Reno 911! revival, which was actually pretty great) which Katzenberg attempted to sell to Facebook and NBCUniversal. Neither platform accepted the offers.
Despite a largely rough existence, the timing of this news is still made at least marginally perplexing by two Emmy wins and the late arrival of the TV app, which was made available just this Tuesday. Still, this looks like a case of “too little, too late,” as it probably wasn’t enough to combat the shortform video platform’s exceedingly slow start (which was exacerbated by an unforgiving pandemic), lack of paid subscribers, and the deluge of bad PR that ostensibly plagued the company on a monthly basis.
Quibi launched on April 6, 2020 with two plans with a slate of original content starring the likes of Chrissy Teigan, Nicole Richie, Tituss Burgess, and more. As of right now, Katzenberg, Whitman, or anyone else from Quibi Holdings, LLC have yet to make a statement.