Quibi will officially shut down on December 1
The streaming service only began operating six months ago in April this year, but announced this week it will be shutting down for good after failing to take off
27 October 2020
And now, a new statement from the company has confirmed the service will “end streaming on or about December 1, 2020”.
The statement read: “Quibi has made the difficult decision to wind down. We anticipate that the service will end streaming on or about December 1, 2020. We appreciate the support we have received from our customers and want to thank you for giving us an opportunity to entertain you.
“At this time we do not know if the Quibi content will be available anywhere after our last day of service. We recommend following #Quibi on Twitter for any news regarding content.”
Quibi launched earlier this year will the premise of delivering original short-form programming via smartphones.
The service had been successful in attracting celebrities to create shows for the platform - including Anna Kendrick’s ‘Dummy’, Chrissy Teigen’s ‘Chrissy’s Court’, and ‘Survive’, which starred Sophie Turner - but failed to get the viewer base needed to keep the service running.
Speaking about the decision to shut down Quibi, co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg said this week: “There was no question that keeping us going was not going to have a different outcome, it was just going to spend a whole lot more money without any value to show for it. So, out of respect for these people that put up this extraordinary amount of capital to do it, that’s irresponsible and we both felt we shouldn’t do it.”
Whilst fellow co-founder Meg Whitman added: “We tried a lot of different things over the summer, whether it was payment-less free trial, 90-day free trial, 14-day free trial. We changed marketing around entirely to be more title marketing than platform marketing, which we made a lot of changes and we also you know, tried a completely different business model in Australia. And ultimately none of it really changed the fundamental answer, that we needed more capital and we needed more capital relatively soon.
“Ultimately probably a couple weeks ago we said, you know, the right thing to do, the hard right but the right thing to do is to return cash to shareholders.”
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