Vulture: “Quibi, the brainchild of Jeffrey Katzenberg, the former Disney studio head and DreamWorks co-founder, had promised to reinvent television by streaming high-quality content in ten-minute-or-less chunks to ‘the TV in your pocket.’ (Quibi, which rhymes with Libby, is short for ‘quick bites.’) Katzenberg believed enough mobile-phone users would want to spend their spare minutes of downtime — while waiting in line for coffee, riding the bus or subway — digesting small plates of premium, Hollywood-quality video, at a monthly cost of $4.99 (with ads) or $7.99 (without ads), when not surfing the amateur stuff on TikTok and -YouTube, scrolling Twitter, or playing Animal Crossing for free. And he was spending lavishly on his hunch.”

“[T]]he 90-day free trials will begin expiring this month. The industry conversion rate from a free trial to a paid subscription hovers below 33 percent. According to research firm Parks Associates, if that holds true for Quibi, it could mean less than 500,000 people would be watching a network that spent hundreds of millions of dollars on brand-new premium content. ‘We don’t know quite what to expect,’ Whitman tells me in late June. Quibi still has a lot of money in the bank — an estimated $750 million by the end of this year’s third quarter — and Katzenberg has said its runway will take it through late 2021. (The Wall Street Journal reported that Quibi will seek to raise an additional $200 million before the end of next year.)”