Quibi
$1.75 billion, six months, gone
Quibi was a mobile-only streaming service for short premium video, founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg with Meg Whitman as CEO. It raised $1.75 billion, launched on 6 April 2020, announced its shutdown six months later, and went dark on 1 December 2020, one of the fastest and most expensive failures in tech history.
Timeline [edit]
- 2018
-
August 2018
Funding
NewTV becomes Quibi
Katzenberg raises $1B before a product exists; Whitman takes the CEO role.
- 2020
-
6 April 2020
Launch
Quibi launches
Mobile-only premium shorts with the rotating Turnstyle player.
-
May 2020
Decline
Free trials expire, usage collapses
No TV app, no sharing, no cultural conversation.
-
21 October 2020
Shutdown announced
The open letter
"The idea itself wasn't strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service."
-
1 December 2020
Shutdown
The app stops working
239 days after launch.
- 2021
-
8 January 2021
Acquisition
Roku buys the content library
Reportedly under $100 million for the whole catalogue.
How it looked [edit]
The site through time
Browse quibi.com as it was, via the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine:
Ownership [edit]
Key figures [edit]
| Metric | Value | As of | Confidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| Valuation (USD) ▲ | $1.75B | 6 April 2020 | Confirmed Total capital raised before launch |
Confirmed official figures · Reported media, cites a source · Estimated analyst or our estimate
Why it shut down [edit]
Official line: Katzenberg and Whitman told investors the idea "was not strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service", blaming both the concept and the pandemic timing; the app stopped working on 1 December 2020.
Our analysis: Quibi raised Hollywood money for a mobile-only premium format nobody had asked for, launched it during a lockdown when everyone was home in front of a television, and shipped without the one feature short video runs on: the ability to share a clip. TikTok took the audience for free.
History [edit]
Hollywood's answer to a question nobody asked
Quibi ("quick bites") launched on 6 April 2020 with $1.75 billion raised from Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, ViacomCBS, Alibaba and others, a roster of A-list talent, and a genuinely clever piece of engineering: Turnstyle, which reframed every show live as you rotated your phone between portrait and landscape.
Everything else went wrong at once. It was phone-only, launching in the week the world was locked in its living rooms with big televisions. It cost $4.99 a month with ads at a time when free short video was everywhere. There was no TV app, no sharing, no way to clip a moment onto Twitter, so the shows generated no cultural conversation. Journalists could not screenshot it. Nobody could meme it.
The fastest big failure
Downloads collapsed after the free trials expired, and by summer the company was exploring a sale. On 21 October 2020, Katzenberg and Whitman published an open letter announcing the shutdown, with reportedly around $350 million returned to investors. The app went dark on 1 December 2020, 239 days after launch. Roku bought the content library in January 2021 for under $100 million, and, in the ultimate indignity, a Quibi show finally won its Emmys after the service that made it no longer existed.
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Sources [edit]
- Quibi Confirms It's Shutting Down Variety 21 October 2020 [archived]
- Quibi Officially Shuts Down, Content No Longer Available to Stream Variety 1 December 2020 [archived]
Last verified: 11 August 2026. Spotted an error? Suggest an edit (corrections with sources are reviewed and applied).