Most people that get to do that have either a prior success to their name, or proximity to a prior success. So get lucky enough to be in a startup that makes it, and hang on (maybe by actually contributing something of value), then after it has been a success you get to sell yourself to VCs as having been a significant part of that prior success.
Claim that you know how to make a team execute on a vision (“a vision” is regarded by VCs as a dime a dozen, executing is where it is at – and they aren’t exactly wrong there, but a great team executing well on a crappy vision churns out a crappy product, and in theory could pivot to a good vision and make that a product, but is would have been way better not to burn through the cash on the bad vision first…plus if your first vision blows goats, who says the second one is any better?)
I know, serious answer to a joke question. I guess the joke answer is “get lucky once and the idiots will assume you can get lucky the next dozen times”
Let’s not kid ourselves here, these were not series, these were movies that were split up into 10 minute segments. How many people watch a movie 10 minutes at a time.
This is the first I heard of it. My first thought was it sounded like one of the medications ads that list a bunch of side effects and never exactly says what it does.
Ask your doctor if Quibi might be for you. May cause anal leakage and/or sudden death.
You could just hear the pitch though. Everyone wants short form content, but this would be produced by really expensive Hollywood stars instead of influencer garbage, and it would adapt to landscape or portrait so the experience would be “native” to the phone… Proof that VCs and CEOs are as dumb or dumber than most.
Now that you mention it, a business model that lets you denigrate a group that is disproportionately young and has a high proportion of women with a pitch about how now it’s time for the adults to move in and take things over sounds like exactly the way to get VCs to give you a billion dollars for a shitty idea that will never work.
Like I get thinking a lot of the influencer stuff is garbage. I’m old enough I agree. But it’s pretty clear that at least the successful ones know what they are doing and are effective at content creation, marketing, and business. The widespread belief held by “serious” people that they don’t know what they are doing is stupid and prejudicial.
Of course outside the big successes it is a super exploitive industry with wannabe famous people doing free promotional labor for both advertisers and platforms in the hopes of making it big. It’s a good thing that hollywood doesn’t have that sort of behavior.
I remember seeing the relentless ads for it featuring big names and weird content. I never bothered to check it out. I’m kind of wishing I could have watched their remake of Princess Bride, though.
After all the money that got flushed down the toilet creating this content I hope it ends up somewhere else. I can imagine a competitor like Netflix or Amazon buying the rights for cheap.
Country to man with 2 billion dollars: “Okay, here’s the deal. You can either solve homelessness completely in one of the major cities for a 2 billion dollar first year stake, and we’ll pick up the tab after that.”
Man with 2 billion dollars: “Or?”
Country: “OR you can invest it in this really stupid idea to give consumers something they don’t want that will ultimately fail because it can’t compete with what’s already on the market, and -”
Man: “-Stop, you sold me on the word stupid. I’ll take number 2.”
With these big-expensive-dumb-money-sink projects I always wonder how the money ended up being distributed; and hoping that, just maybe, someone involved slipped up and ended up inadvertently actually turning some of that so-much-money-we-literally-don’t-know-what-to-do-with-it investor cash into a windfall for people who do real work(rather than, say, losing so much money that they distort an entire sector, like Uber or WeWork).
Most obviously a bunch of video was produced for the purpose; hopefully things worked out for the people involved in doing that.
On the backend, how much of the money went to keeping good, honest, server nerds in esoteric keyboards, either in-house or through farming out to existing CDN and ‘cloud’ providers?
I’m going to try to pass over the marketing costs in relative silence (Social-pragmatics Wittgenstein says “whereof one has nothing nice to say; thereof one must remain silent.”); but some of that probably involved real people too.
TL;DR, I always wonder if these sorts of high-profile debacles are pure triumphs of financial engineering pulled by people who can do better by failing on a nearly unimaginable scale than most of us could ever dream of doing by dint of arduous success; or are they (like certainly classes of veblen good) potentially actually a mechanism by which wealth is transferred from investors to the people who handled the implementation of the stupid idea of the moment.
Setup: A middle age woman is on a boat with her hair blowing in the breeze at sunset. Male narrator comes on in the background: “Did you know that 1 in 14 women suffer from an easily preventable disease?”. Man with a sweater wrapped around his shoulders walks up and puts his arm around her; she looks at him lovingly and smiles.
Scene cut: minority father at home is playing ball with his son in the back yard; narrator again. “And it’s not just women. Studies have shown that small percentages of cases exist with males, too.” Man tosses ball to son, then winces and puts his hand on his back.
Scene cut: someone holding a pipette in a clean room lab measuring something in a Erlenmeyer flask. Narrator: “A new treatment is available to get your life back on track. Quibi.” Although it might not be for everyone, clinical trials have demonstrated a %50 reduction of symptoms with only minor side effects. Ask your doctor if Quibi is right for you. Because life goes by too fast and you don’t want to slow down.
Literally the only piece of content from Quibi that seems to have entered the online consciousness is this wild-ass show about a woman with a golden prosthetic arm, which is so bad it feels like it has to be some sort of parody or satire but also it’s played completely straight, so who knows.
The intermittent short form (roll credits in the middle of the show every ten minutes) was apparently so they could avoid paying actors and writers union scale.
Was a really, really dumb idea from the start. It’s painful watching these soulless late capitalist automaton drones attempt to come up with “good ideas” for things people would actually want to use. Not to mention the standard of living keeps dropping due to them and neoliberalism on the whole gutting basic living standards (affordable rent + health care + education set the overall stage for one’s economic life) so any ideas they come up will be increasingly detached from how most people actually live. But I’m sure they had “data” and “metrics” that proved they had a great “business model…” To make really, really, laughably dumb shit.
