After Quibi launched, I described it as "Hollywood's purest vision for how mobile entertainment should be consumed" for the brevity of its content and the total hostility it had toward viewers. It blocked screenshots, threatened its only significant fan podcast with a trademark lawsuit, and reportedly lost 92% of its viewers after their free trials. Having blown through its billions in funding in a few short months, it's shutting down.
The closure is a stunning end to Katzenberg's hopes of creating a new category of video entertainment, short programs of a few minutes in length that could be watched on the go. Katzenberg, a former Disney executive who later helped start DreamWorks, raised nearly $2 billion to finance Quibi. Among the backers were most of the major Hollywood studios, Google, Alibaba and the Madrone Capital Partners.
