Jeffrey Katzenberg’s video streaming service Quibi is shutting down, said a person familiar with the situation, bringing down the curtain on the short-form video streaming service just six months after it launched.
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.
Quibi scheduled calls with investors and employees on Wednesday afternoon to deliver the news. In a statement released Wednesday afternoon, Katzenberg appeared to blame the pandemic for Quibi's failure. "The world has changed dramatically since Quibi launched and our standalone business model is no longer viable."
