Quibi Shutting Down After Six Months | THR News - video Dailymotion

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After raising nearly $2 billion in funding and promising to reinvent the way people consume entertainment programming, Quibi is shutting down six months after its launch.

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00:00Quibi is calling it quits only six months after its launch.

00:04The Quibi executives raised close to $2 billion for their mobile-first video startup,

00:09aiming to reinvent the way people consumed entertainment programming.

00:12And on Wednesday, they announced it will be coming to an end.

00:15In a public letter, executives Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman wrote,

00:18It is with an incredibly heavy heart that today we are announcing that we are winding down the business

00:23and looking to sell its content and technology assets.

00:26Our failure was not for lack of trying.

00:28We've considered and exhausted every option available to us.

00:32The pair noted that they will look to return cash to shareholders,

00:35lay off employees as part of the shutdown, and look for buyers for its assets.

00:39The company has been evaluating options for weeks, including a possible sale.

00:43Quibi had more than 100 original series,

00:45and several projects were nominated for short-form Emmy Awards,

00:48but the service struggled to build up subscribers.

00:51Katzenberg and Whitman suggested two possible reasons for Quibi's failure.

00:54Because the idea itself wasn't strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service

00:59or because of our timing, unfortunately, we will never know.

01:02But we suspect it's been a combination of the two.

01:05The plan was to entice users with short-form stories that could only be watched on the go.

01:09But an April launch in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic,

01:12which forced people to stay home, made the $5 a month subscription a difficult sell.

01:17The company has been conducting business as usual, according to a source,

01:20so the shutdown may come as a surprise.

01:23A Quibi spokeswoman declined to comment.

01:25For more on this story, head to THR.com.

01:27For The Hollywood Reporter News, I'm Ashley Bellman, and I'll catch you later.

Quibi Shutting Down After Six Months | THR News

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