Quibi catches up with the rest of the world, realizes watching TV on your phone is awful

By Britt Hayes | April 14, 2020 | 3:41pm

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Quibi catches up with the rest of the world, realizes watching TV on your phone is awful

Photo: Daniel Boczarski

Quibi, which is—according to various ads on TV, of all places—pronounced like “Quibbi,” has finally realized what everyone else has known for many years now: Watching TV shows on your phone sucks. The new streaming platform, which serves up “quick bites” (ugh) of original series, meant to be watched “on the go” couldn’t have picked a worse time to launch. With COVID-19 keeping most people indoors, streaming services have unsurprisingly seen a huge uptick in viewers, while Quibi only managed to net 300,000 live downloads on its first day—just seven percent of the downloads accumulated by Disney+ at launch. In a completely not shocking turn of events, it turns out that people are not into watching 10-minute episodes of TV on their phones right now. Maybe because the phone is the thing you fiddle with while you’re watching shows on real TV.

According to Business Insider, the folks at Quibi have realized the error of their ways. During an appearance on CNBC, Quibi CEO Meg Whitman said that the company is currently working on implementing a feature that would allow users to cast Quibi content to their TVs. “We had always planned to be able to cast to your TV, so we’re gonna see if we can accelerate that in the engineering roadmap,” Whitman said, adding that it “was never part of the launch” plan. Whitman made no mention of developing a smart TV app, which would make Quibi even more accessible—but might also defeat the purpose of this incredibly silly concept.