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Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman bet big on Quibi, locking down a billion dollars in funding, the support of every major Hollywood studio, and hiring some of the biggest names in entertainment to make content for the mobile-only streaming service. But what they couldn’t have foreseen was a global pandemic coinciding with the launch of their service. Just a little more than a week after its debut, the Quibi app has already fallen out of the top 40 free apps on Apple’s U.S. app store.
Today, a Twitter user claimed that Quibi has dropped out of the U.S. iPhone Top 60 and is trailing an ASMR app. While we weren’t able to replicate those results ourselves, that tweet did inspire us to take a look at the Quibi charts standings – and the results don’t look great for the new kid on the block. Currently, Quibi is sitting at number 7 in the entertainment category – not bad – but when you look in the free section of the “Top Charts” category, that’s when the full picture starts to come into focus.
Quibi’s sitting at number 46 on that chart right now, which is decidedly not great for a brand new streaming service. That positioning seems even more brutal when you take into account the fact that there is messaging all over the app store explaining that Quibi is offering a free 90-day trial. The idea that it’s that low, and people know they get three months free? During a pandemic, when people are hungry for new content? Katzenberg and Whitman probably aren’t doing cartwheels in quarantine right about now. (Incidentally, “Cartwheels in Quarantine” sounds like the name of a show that would be on Quibi.)
I don’t want to spend too much time beating a dead horse or kicking an app when it’s down, but you have to think that in the first few weeks of release, a new streaming app with an expensive, flashy roll out should definitely be hovering within the top 25. And maybe it would have been, if this pandemic weren’t happening and people were able to use Quibi like it was intended – watching little snippets of content on the bus or train on the way to work, or during a lunch break at the office. But now that our lives have drastically changed, those time gaps Quibi was trying to fill don’t really exist in the same way. Call it bad luck, bad timing, or a combination of both, but the fact that Quibi is falling in the charts this early does not bode well for the service’s position in the streaming wars. And just think – there are still two more major players (Peacock and HBO Max) set to enter the fray.
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