#Quibi, We Hardly Knew Ye: 6 Highlights From the Streamer’s Brief Run

If Quibi wasn’t a brilliant experiment in streaming television, it certainly was a bold one. Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg and CEO Meg Whitman thought Quibi and its “quick bites” of content were the future of television—the startup was even called NewTV at first—but the $2 billion venture couldn’t cut it in the streaming wars.

Katzenberg and Whitman confirmed on October 22 that Quibi will be shutting down after just six months, with a customer support article citing December 1 as the streaming platform’s last day online.

“Quibi was a big idea and there was no one who wanted to make a success of it more than we did,” Katzenberg and Whitman wrote in an open letter on Medium. “Our failure was not for lack of trying; we’ve considered and exhausted every option available to us.”

The duo speculated that Quibi didn’t succeed “because the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing”—or, perhaps, a combination of the two.

Still, Katzenberg and Whitman did do some things right. Here’s a recap of their successes—including Quibi’s celebrity roster, its Emmy victories, and even its eleventh-hour move to TV sets.