If there’s one thing that can be attributed to the uproarious success of The Mandalorian on Disney+ it’s that fans were quickly able to take screenshots, make gifs, and post memes about moments from each new episode as they aired. You couldn’t open any of the many social media accounts you have without seeing a meme of Baby Yoda ripped straight from a browser player of Disney+. The latest entrant to the streaming wars, Quibi, had a different tactic for their service though and decided not to let anyone screenshot their content…at all. It’s unclear if that will change in the near future, but the creators of Quibi are having second thoughts about some of their features (and lack thereof) after the public got their hands on the service.
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“There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right,” Quibi co-founder Jeffrey Katzenberg told The New York Times in a new profile. “But now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, ‘Uh-oh, we didn’t see that.’”
Among those things is seemingly allowing users the ability to screenshots photos and images from their shows. As NYT writes in their piece: “Quibi will be less walled off from the internet, and users will be able to share its content on social media platforms.” What that sharing actively entails is unclear at this point, but considering the primary means for watching Quibi’s shows and movies was on mobile devices it was a noticeably absent feature. Perhaps soon you’ll be able to actually take screenshots of shows like Chrissy’s Court, Gayme Show, and the new Reno 911!
That method of watching content on the service won’t be the exclusive means for long though as they have confirmed users will be able to watch Quibi content on their televisions in the near future. Katzenberg and fellow co-founder Meg Whitman have both “backpedaled on their original commitment to a smartphone-only app,” confirming that Quibi subscribers with iPhones can cast to their TVs in an update this week, while Android users “will have to wait a few more weeks.”
Katzenberg also didn’t mince words when it came to the app’s successes and failures post-launch, telling the outlet: “I attribute everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus. Everything. But we own it.”
Despite showy statistics from the early part of Quibi’s life on mobile platforms, the service has failed to really capture audiences. Quibi was reportedly only downloaded 300,000 times which pales in comparison to Disney+, which was downloaded four million times on its first day. Katzenberg is unphased by comparisons to other streaming services that are doing well during these times though, saying: “That’s like comparing apples to submarines. I don’t know what people are expecting from us. What did Netflix look like 30 days after it launched? To tell me about a company that has a billion users and is doing great in the past six weeks, I’m happy for them, but what the hell does it have to do with me?”
During their last earnings call Netflix announced that in the first quarter of 2020 they had beaten out their subscriber growth prediction two-fold, nabbing 15.77 million additional paid subscribers after predicting 7 million.
(Cover photo Illustration by Rafael Henrique/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images)
