Quibi Drama
Emailed on January 10th 2020 in The Friday Forward
Quibi, the short-form mobile video content startup targeted at millenials and co-founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, announced $400 million in new funding this week. That's on top of the $1 billion they raised in 2018 from a star-studded roster of investors.
Then they held a riveting interview at CES Wednesday where, after being challenged on 'what problem Quibi solves,' proceeded to insult millennials for a solid half-hour. More on that below, but first some background:
Quibi's investor list is unreal: Disney, Alibaba, NBCUniversal, 21st Century Fox, Lionsgate, Metro Goldwyn Mayer, Sony Pictures Entertainment, Viacom, and Warner Media. So basically all of Hollywood.
Quibi's director list is unreal: The Los Angeles-based upstart has signed production deals with big-name directors (Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Catherine Hardwicke, to name a few), and yesterday unveiled a new technology that lets users seamlessly switch between watching the same video on their smartphones either vertically or horizontally — enabling different perspectives of the same scene.
Quibi's founders are unreal: Meg Whitman is the former HP CEO, and Jeffrey Katzenberg is a longtime media mogul (former chairman at Disney).
Katzenberg is also a walking "OK Boomer" meme with quotes like this one from CES: “Sorry. I’ve been doing this — I get to say this — I’ve been doing this before you all were fucking born.”
Which is about as solid a defense of Quibi as its investors make when asked how it differentiates from the saturated streaming scene: “You don’t want to bet against Katzenberg.”
As a millennial, I might have been born yesterday, but quotes like that make for a rocky start to a multi-billion dollar, pre-product media company targeted at millennials.
