How did Quibi - a streaming service created by Hollywood and Silicon Valley elites crash and burn so badly? Let's find out. Twitter - / ordinarytings Patreon - / ordinarythings
The American Dream mall in NJ. It's a legend/joke/horror story in New Jersey. Bright Sun Films has done a great video on it. Nothing says American Dream like over 2 decades of a corporate boondoggle subsidized by taxpayer dollars built on environmentally sensitive land despite local opposition!
I especially hated how in most of the ads it didn’t even explain itself. So as many of them as i’d seen i never learned what Quibi was and the ads made no sense at all.
Here's another: The overhead on running Quibi is insane. You can't produce that much unique content, develop an app, run an entire corporate office with 250 employees and run quality assurance at ~$6.50/month average revenue per customer. There's literally no way this thing was going to be profitable. Maybe at $15/month with a substantially larger user base. Edit: Once they saw that the users were around 72,000 I have to think the investors IMMEDIATELY were looking to sell off their technology development and original programming to whoever would take it. I'm not an expert on growth models for Quibi's specific kind of streaming service but I would imagine if they stayed the course and expected an average user increase each month it would have taken many, MANY years before they were even close to sniffing a profit without changing their price point.
@@williamapple7705 its amazing to me with this money they didn't just go poach content creators, offer them commission per view, and put their content behind a paywall.
Ah yes, millennials, the generation who watches hours long actual play DND shows and binges Netflix and watches endless let's play streams are also famous for their short attention spans of under 10 minutes
@D.A. Botos nah I’m gen z that’s definitely us. We are the short content users, vine, tik tok, Snapchat, and then both gen z and millennials use Instagram and youtube
@D.A. Botos still though I have a great attentionspan. I frequently watch hours long video essay’s on history and geopolitics so idk. Every generation thinks the next one is lazy and impatient
I don’t like when companies just invent “solutions” to non existent problems. Case in point, being able to watch a show in portrait mode in addition to landscape. Landscape was never a problem. Just seems like useless shit that out of touch people thought was cool
That's what happens when companies twist their shitty services around how they easily can market it rather than first come up with a good service that doesn't require extensive marketing and advertising to trick people into thinking it's a good service. They seriously seem to make all their decisions on the hope that their marketing strategies convince people into liking a barren shitty clone of every other service rather than creating a service that attracts users by being good on its own without needing to rely on marketing and ads to tell people it's something they need.
its because its easier than actually making something new, innovative, and useful. just add in a feature literally no one wanted and bam you can claim you're breaking new ground
The golden arm thing must be based on a spooky old story although made modern in a way which kinda loses it's charm. It's a story about a lady with a golden leg who gets buried with it and then the husband steals it, but he can't sleep since he keeps hearing her moan "My leg! My leg! Give me back my golden leg!" and he keeps sending people out there to console her and basically tries to gas light her into thinking she has it or denying he has it. Eventually he goes there and she strangles him. I usually listen through old recordings of Vincent price telling spooky stories around halloween and i remembered that one from the plot of that quibi thing.
11:44 ... But gold is chemically inert. That's what makes it ideal for biomedical shit just like that. It's the same reason we use platinum a ton in the medical field. Just pick a metal that isn't noble if you want it to make her sick. I get that I'm overthinking a Quibi ghost show here, but that one gets 0/10 from me.
Nah, it's OK, you weren't overthinking nearly as far as they were underthinking. Because even if you ignore that gold couldn't kill you like that (I mean, haven't they heard of gold teeth? Or that there is fancy food and drink with gold in it?), the whole story is just dog shit. So her incompetent husband fucks up, making a tree fall on his wife's arm? And the wife is obsessed with expensive shit (how did she marry a lumberjack, then? Not trophy wife enough for a millionaire?) But the lumberjack also just so happens to make prosthetic limbs? Or is he a designer of prosthetic limbs and only took down the tree himself because his wife pissed away all the money on jewelry? (I mean that could actually make sense here - have the wife be so obnoxious about it that he agrees to do it himself so she can get another pearl necklace - wow, I came up with a better plot in like 10 seconds flat, and I don't have a Hollywood budget!) Either way, he shows her that he can make her a new arm, and the first thing she says is "Make it out of gold", and he agrees? What the fuck? Apparently they couldn't afford that nonsense, so maybe that would have been a good time to talk some sense into his wife. People get their fingers cut off for expensive rings, imagine what happens if a bunch of criminals see her solid gold arm! And besides, aren't good prosthetics actually functional? I don't think you can make a solid gold arm functional. But the real joke hasn't even arrived, which is incredible considering this is a short format story. The contender for the dumbest plot twist of all time is that when the wife learns that her gold arm is poisoning her (which, as you said, makes no sense, but let's ignore that), she refuses to take it off. She would rather die than have a fake arm made of anything other than gold. What the fucking fuck of fuckness? After that, there's the part where the husband robs her grave. Why? Just take her arm off when she dies. I don't think she can really enforce her being buried with it. Especially if he's in debt over the fucking thing. It's in fact more likely that he'd have to fight for her to be buried with the very thing the bank has him by the balls for.
Is the WHOLE THING made of gold? No silicone mold underneath it? Or mechanical parts to make it function?? How fucking heavy would that thing be?? You'd be more likely to dislocate your shoulder than die of metal poisoning! Why not just take it off, put some protective shit inside it and stick it back on?? Why not offer to stuff the fucking thing with gems and jewels if she agrees to take it off? Why not take legal guardianship of her since she's clearly a danger to herself for leaving that fucking thing on?!? *This isn't a story!!*
technically you can get heavy metal poisoning from gold, but you basically have to eat a shitload of gold salts. This isn't impossible, but it would never happen unintentionally.
In the end, Quibi was the ultimate Millennial content. Embodying every Millennial's desire to die a swift and early death thanks to the pain of living in the aftermath of old rich people thinking they have any idea how to make a single good decision, Quibi hoisted the millennial banner stained with the tears of the wealthy who can't figure out how to get broke people to buy shit and plowed straight into the ground with it like a goddamn hero.
And then they decided what millennials actually wanted was shows about talking sex dolls and people remaking crime scenes. Meanwhile, actual millennials are turning Bridgeton and The Queen’s Gambit into cultural phenomena.
A show about being paid to survive anime-style killers would be really cool You spend 1 to 3 episodes with a protagonist trying to survive, and in these episodes they either get killed or avoid/defeat the various killers while you learn more about them and their reason to want the money Some have just reasons, while some are straight up bad people
I find it amusing that they assume every millennial only watches short-form content. Meanwhile 1 hour + video essays are becoming more popular for all viewers on RU-vid...
@blue i know this is a joke, but isn't gold like really stable? Like it doesn't even rusts with oxygen exposure, so isn't it like one of the least poisonous metals there are?
@@undeadsoldier3258 yes, and that's the reason its used for fake teeth. However it is expensive so many turn to other metals that poison them (slowly, not like the arm) or use ceramic that is safer, better looking but not as durable. even if it did hurt her, why did they have to attach it directly?
I just please need someone to explain to me how Anna Kendrick got an Emmy nomination for her role in the sex doll show in 2020. How the hell is that even reality?!?
She seems like the type of grandmother who would buy their grand kids a cheap Chinese knock-off of a LEGO set and tell them she got it because she knows how much they love their "build 'em blocks."
@@tsotate Most boomers and Gen Xers don't realize that millennials now are largely family aged and own homes and the college-aged kids are all zoomers at this point. To them, anybody who is a younger person is a "millennial" which is funny bc some millennials nowadays are actually turning into old farts
Fun fact: Meg Whitman is a multi-billionaire who ran for and was the nominee for Republican Governor of California in... 2010? IIRC? She lost horribly, obviously.
Except it may have been SUCH a spectacular and short-lived failure that the only people who bring it up are listicles searching for the most obscure failures to reference.
You think it's going to take five or ten years?! It has been exactly 31 days since the app went offline and the company dissolved, and my first thought on seeing the thumbnail for this video was, "Oh yeah, that was a thing!"
Quibi really should have been marketed to Gen X. The platform no one cared about, with shows no one watched, for the generation everyone forgets exists
I wouldnt say we forgot gen x. It's just that unlike boomers, millennials, and gen z, gen x is 100% mentally unhealthy but only 75% of them refuse to admit it. We all like to blame boomers for the state of the world rn, but all they can be credited with is being bad parents. Gen x are the ones who destroyed the world that boomers reminisce about and the same world us gen z are nostalgic for.
@@syndicate7934 The current state of the world had it seeds sown long before the boomers and the Gen X'ers ruled the roost. Unfortunately Gen Z is by far the most mentally unstable and socially inept generation ever. They are more concerned with smartphones, pronouns, and Twitter soapbox politics than anything impactful.
I actually thought The Most Dangerous Game would be an adaptation of the short story... since it's short-form entertainment... it only takes like twenty minutes to read the original.
Ah yes, me and my friends famously love watching story content in short 5-10 minute bursts and not binge watching entire seasons of shows in one or two sittings. We definitely don't use short breaks to just check in to social media and move on with our lives. We definitely don't just use free-ass RU-vid to fill empty watch time.
I did the free trial soley for the Nicole Ritchie comedy show but realized that each episode was only like 5 minutes long each and I was like, WTF?! Ya I'm not gonna pay a monthly fee for a 5 minute sketch. That's for RU-vid
Yeah it's better to watch an 1-hour special ten minutes at a time than to watch something that was made to be 10 minutes long. You just lose momentum at the end of each episode. And we're not gold fishes, we can pause stuff and jump right in later.
can you imagine an altruistic tv show that instead of building fancy mini houses for dogs that already have one they built actual houses at a loss for actual homeless people, who don't .
@@videosammy this reminds me of that extreme make over home edition show. the people who owned the homes that got redone could no longer afford to maintain them/pay bills and ended up having to sell them. :// very unfortunate.
@@universe514 yep. The irony of it is fixing up your home and making it better meant paying more property taxes. If thats not the biggest " fuck you" ive ever heard of then i dont know what is xD Bunch of government hipocrites
They're 10 years too late. Millennials have real jobs now. Gen Z make the culture rules. They decide what's cool and what's cringe, and anything that costs money is not gonna grab them.
The irony is that, while I do spend WAY too much time on my phone (work nights); I seek out super LONG form content because having to stop working to change the video every few minutes is a nightmare. So podcasts are the best. But I'm probably the minority
All this generation stuff is just jargon for historians and corporate entities so that they can refer to a certain age group with a shorthand. It’s not really worth debating the exact ages, but I think millennials are people who are reached young adulthood at the start of the 21rst century
Quibi was what happened when a bunch of suits saw the success of tik tok and thought “what if we did this but squeezed every last penny out of the user base”
Now the term Quibi will catch on, as slang for "complete and utter corporate failure due to disconnection with their target demographic." Example: "Wow they really pulled a Quibi, didn't they?"
I worked for hp right after meg whitman left. it was still a horrible culture of fear. nobody would train you to do anything because they knew it meant they would get laid off.
All the shows on it seem like "show within a show" parodies you'd find in a real show. Itself, that can definitely work; but literally everything seemed to be that.
That moment when even Internet Historian makes Ordinary Things having his natural hair color in the main role of his feature length special. But Ordinary Things still doesn't get the drift. We still love you though!
The gold arm show is actually legit hilarious. Like that’s something I would totally watch on RU-vid. Which is as high praise as anything on that stupid platform deserves.
I think hollywood has overestimated how much millennials like watching vain, self-obsessed rich people like spending money on trivial things. That's a Gen X staple.
Just to clarify I’m not a millennial or gen Z. But you’re totally correct. Millennials still have a work ethic so watching talentless fools who have barely worked a day in their life doesn’t appeal to them. Whereas gen z want everything handed to them on a plate and think it’s unfair to have to work for it because boomers “fucked the economy”. So yeah they love to watch that sorta shit.
@@PeruvianPotato Depends on who you watch and what content you like. RU-vid has so much more variety than any streaming platform out there at the moment. Sure its not perfect, but at least its free for everyone to use/create/watch on.
One of the other big failures of Quibi has got to be the awful marketing. They shoved ads for it everywhere. That It got to the point I wanted nothing to do with the app. The fact you had to pay for it was already awful, but top it off with marketing that doesn't realize how annoying it is is just the worst.
"We need something to represent his humble roots and his Hollywood lifestyle." Not to take the subtlety out of your well-timed humor, but I think the reason Quibi failed is that THOSE WORDS CAME OUT OF A HUMAN MOUTH. About a DOG. SOMEONE GREENLIT THIS. Mystery solved.
Sometimes, when I have to refill my car's gas tank, I end up at these gas stations that have televisions inside the pumps that play constantly. Its awful stuff, mostly commercials. But it's exactly what I would imagine Quibi's shows to be like.
I know I’m late but press all the buttons around the screen, one will be a mute button but they don’t label it to try and force you to watch it. Never had it fail
It just shows how the minds of Hollywood executives can be made up with a flashy dose of nothingness and comit to $2 billion but the general public cannot. Surprisingly, failures like this give me faith in humanity.
At 9:30 I heard "This four-legged *psychic* needs his cool digs" and was expecting a psychic dog who works a day job in architecture. Be honest, with Quibi you wouldn't bat an eye at that premise.
Don't forget, Chris Evans, Captain America, is a Millennial. Whenever someone talks about millennials, they're inadvertently talking about Captain America
It's kinda reassuring to know that the public at large won't just do *anything* the advertisers say. Even if the advertisers have a staggering budget and lots of vapid celebs.
Some of these concepts sound more like weird and obscure manga I'd read rather than high budget TV shows for a worthless ap. Which would be pretty cool, if the concept was actually done justice. There's these really weird and passionate sounding ideas, but that passion is completely lost somewhere along the line.
I distinctly remember the flood of Quibi ads, I also distinctly remember not giving a shit about it because I could understand or glean nothing from them.
The only time I ever watched a Quibi was when Charlie McDonnell (charlieissocoollike) uploaded the first episode of his show to RU-vid. It actually looked decent! the main thing of quibi being ONLY watchable on phones was a major part of the problem.
i got an ad for a construction compant right as you were saying that the stuff is "gold" and i didnt notice the difference untill i saw the yellow bar"
The episode about the woman with the golden arm is literally Tobias dying because his body was rejecting his hairplugs, except taken slightly more seriously ("The doctors say I need my hairplugs removed; they say that's the cure" vs "let's just take your golden arm off")
The one show I watched was actually pretty good, but I don't wanna watch a TV show completely on my phone. I like to sit down and eat something, not hold my phone.
Worth noting that the majority of the content produced for Quibi can now be watched for free on Roku. I actually watched the entirety of Murder House Flip at a hotel on vacation without ever knowing it was originally made for Quibi.
7:23 wow is this how they seriously talk at these expo things...I've never seen one in real life. It's kinda weird and patronizing. They just chop everything and everyone down into a lil statistic
11:10 - 12:30 I heard this story when I was I kid in fourth grade. The only changes to the story were - crazy gold lady ripped off her arm with a farming machine accident - they lived in the small town I lived in - the dude bought the arm for crazy gold arm lady of her birthday
The most dangerous game was pretty entertaining, but I don't know how much of that was the fact it was blatantly shot in my hoke town of Toronto. I've been to every outdoor location and some of the interiors for that show.
The only thing I ever saw of quibi were a few of the ads that appeared on RU-vid, and considering I skipped those immediately yeah this didn't stick out to me at all.
I kinda wish this idea had succeeded. I never watched it, I just remember making fun of the advertisements for seeming extremely out of touch. But still, I think there’s definitely a lot of novelty in watching tv shows that seem like they’re created by AI or aliens. It’s like driving by a car accident.
