bury quibi with its golden arm
At a time when many of us had nothing better to do than to stare at our phones, the app couldn't find an audience.
Quibi/YouTube
This past week, came the unsurprising-yet-abrupt news: short-form mobile video app Quibi announced that, just six months after its launch, it will be shutting down operations. The Twitter takes were, expectedly, brutal:
No idea what Quibi is? If so, that’s the main problem entirely. Let me explain:
The app, led by ex-Disney chairman Jeffrey Katzenberg and former eBay CEO Meg Whitman, bet big on legacy Hollywood talent, boasting a packed roster of high-profile talent including Reese Witherspoon, Chrissy Teigen, Chance the Rapper, Dwayne Johnson, Tina Fey, Idris Elba, Jennifer Lopez, Joe Jonas and more. And its shows were all offered in “quick bite” episodes of 10 minutes or less.
But the effort misread the room so tremendously that consuming the seemingly endless stream of features on Quibi’s missteps quickly became far more entertaining than actually watching Quibi’s content, even when it was being offered for free. By the end of its trial run, the service only retained only an abysmal 8 percent of its users to paid subscribers. All this despite its raking in an obscene total of $1.75 billion in venture capital funding — more than half of the entire total of VC capital raised by all U.S. women-led startups last year.
There are dozens upon dozens of think pieces already out there dissecting and dunking on this news, but I will say that Quibi’s problem was primarily one of its content: Rather than offering memorable storytelling, the company seemingly focused on landing well-known names. As a result, it didn’t drum up a single true hit to attract new users to the platform.
The closest the app came to a viral hit was its “The Golden Arm” episode of its Sam Raimi-produced 50 States of Fright series. The episode features Emmy-award winning Mrs. Maisel star Rachel Brosnahan (!!) as a woman positively obsessed with her golden prosthetic arm (!?). A clip from the episode went viral on Twitter and seemed to portend the service’s eventual demise.
Other offerings from Quibi that I caught during the free trial felt more promising to varying degrees, even if some of them sounded like they were in the same vein as MILF Island. There was the ludicrous-yet-strangely-sincere Murder House Flip and the who-asked-for-this? reboot of Singled Out (hosted by the brilliant duo of Joel Kim Booster and Keke Palmer). The (accidentally?) aptly titled Useless Celebrity History show hosted by figure skater Adam Rippon. Then there was the entertaining Gayme Show, which nonetheless felt indebted in spirit to Guy Branum’s Talk Show the Game Show.
Ultimately, even the best of these offerings felt stale compared to the endless scroll of fresh, raw talent already excelling at short-form video via TikTok and YouTube— and all that content is being created for free. Why the Quibi team didn’t even consider these platforms to be their competition to begin with is seriously wild to me, and I look forward to ex-employees inevitably speaking to the layers of incompetence that got us here.
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Listen: Just in time for Halloween, music producer Johnny Jewel’s always-spooky synth pop label Italians Do It Better has released After Dark 3, its third-ever compilation including a range of its most well-known acts — like Chromatics and Desire — and newer additions to the roster. Ahead of the album’s release, Jewel and co. put together a pre-release party on Twitch and it’s probably the most entertaining music livestream I’ve seen during the pandemic. The whole thing is wonderfully atmospheric and sexy, but I’d especially recommend Malta-based singer Joon’s cover of the 2020 theme song Cruel Summer. You can listen to the the album here or on the streaming service of your choice:
Watch: This month has been such a whirlwind I can’t remember if I already shared this here, but if you haven’t read it already I’d like to recommend (again?) that you read E. Alex Jung’s profile of former Bon Appétit YouTube star Sohla El-Waylly on Vulture.
With the BA Test Kitchen back to releasing videos featuring a mix of its remaining stars, I think El-Waylly’s additional context on the (alleged) behavior of Chris Morocco and others that are still contributing to the channel is incredibly important. In the meantime, check out El-Waylly making a restaurant-quality seven-course meal as part of her new show “Stump Sohla” on the Binging with Babish YouTube channel.
Read: As comforted as I’ve been by things like El-Waylly’s return to YouTube and binging on Quibi hot-takes, there’s only so many of those. So, I’ve also found myself falling back on classic comfort watches like the new season of The Great British Baking Show on Netflix in quarantine. Unfortunately, I haven’t found myself as pulled in by the current season as I have been by past editions of the show, but I wasn’t sure why.
Then, I saw this new piece by Brian Phillips for The Ringer making the rounds on Twitter and things started making more sense. I don’t agree with all the points here, but I do agree that the current judging and hosting cast feels somewhat unbalanced with male energy, and that the current contestants are missing a certain something. Maybe it has something to do with the current season filming in a bubble, preventing contestants from returning to their homes during the week? At any rate, yes, #SaveGBBO is a cause I hope we can all get behind.