“We feel that we’ve exhausted all our options. As a result we have reluctantly come to the difficult decision to wind down the business, return cash to our shareholders, and say goodbye to our colleagues with grace,” the announcement reads.

There is any number of factors that can be pointed to in unpacking Quibi’s demise: the launch of a mobile-only streaming service at the height of a global pandemic when users were stuck at home; the lack of any real breakout content that was compelling enough to tempt subscribers; or the fact that shortform video content has a nearly infinite amount of free competition in the form of YouTube, TikTok, and other platforms.

Quibi itself is chalking up the lack of success because “the idea itself wasn’t strong enough to justify a standalone streaming service or because of our timing.” The company will be notifying current subscribers as to the final date that they’ll be able to access Quibi.

It’s not clear what will happen to the company’s lineup of expensive, star-studded original shows and shortform films after the shutdown. Earlier reportsindicated that Katzenberg had courted Apple, WarnerMedia, and Facebook to try to acquire the beleaguered streaming company earlier this year. When those efforts failed, Katzenberg reportedly tried to get Facebook and NBCUniversal to at least pick up Quibi’s content, to no success. Quibi will continue to attempt to sell both the content and the underlying technology used in its apps in the coming months, however.

Disclosure: Comcast, which owns NBCUniversal, is an investor in Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company. Vox Media also has a deal with Quibi to produce a show, and there were early talks about a Verge show as well.

Quibi began turning heads in the entertainment industry immediately after the Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman-led venture was announced in 2018. The streaming service, which only works on mobile devices and features content that is exclusively doled out in 10-minute-or-less installments, is entirely unlike any other major streaming service on the market. The platform’s patented Turnstyle technology allows users to seamlessly switch between horizontal and vertical displays, and Quibi content creators can give their projects different scenes or character perspectives depending on which display is being used.

While Quibi’s short-form approach and unique technology helps differentiate it from other streamers, neither of those factors were ever going to guarantee success. Such an experimental platform would be a large gamble in the best of times, and the global instability caused by stay-at-home directives is unlikely to do Quibi any favors.

Quibi has billed itself as the ideal streaming service for consumers on the go. The content isn’t meant to be binged on the couch; it’s for individuals who are in line at a coffee shop, on the bus, or otherwise only have a few minutes to spare. The problem is, nobody is doing those things right now because everybody is holed up indoors. Whitman has explicitly stated that Quibi is not meant to directly compete with the likes of Netflix, Disney+, or other leading streaming services, but current events mean that Quibi will have to do exactly that, at least for now.

Even if Quibi wasn’t releasing during a global pandemic, there’s another key issue the platform will have to contend with: Strong, reliable Wi-Fi connections are rarely universally accessible for consumers who are out of the house, and streaming high-quality Quibi videos will presumably eat into most individual’s data plans at a worrying rate.

Granted, none of these potential issues are related to Quibi’s programming, which could serve as the streaming service’s saving grace. Quibi is promising a veritable avalanche of original content: It launched with 50 titles and is promising to release around 175 series in its first year. Quibi plans on releasing three hours of content every weekday, which is could be fantastic for user retention. Given that Quibi is marketing itself to younger demographics, who do not regularly watch cable news, its Daily Essentials (essentially curated hard news shows) could also serve as a strong selling point.

Will Quibi’s programming be good enough for viewers to keep coming back? That’s something that only time will tell, but the streaming service’s massive star power certainly can’t hurt. The platform launched with shows starring Idris Elba, Chance the Rapper, Chrissy Teigen, Liam Hemsworth, and Christoph Waltz. Jennifer Lopez produced a show and Reese Witherspoon presents a different one. Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg are working on Quibi projects, as are a laundry list of other entertainment industry A-listers. This isn’t even remotely close to a comprehensive list of Quibi’s collaborators; at this point, it would be easier to list the household names who aren’t attached to a project for the streaming service.

Quibi’s numerous celebrity project creators and stars can be credited to the charisma of Katzenberg and Whitman, in addition to the platform’s enormous financial backing. Katzenberg was Walt Disney Studios’ former chairman and later co-founded DreamWorks Animation, while Whitman, a former eBay CEO, has long been a Silicon Valley power player. The duo is politically connected and have spent much of the last several years aggressively promoting Quibi to Hollywood leaders and potential investors. Their gambit has succeeded: Quibi has raised a staggering $1.75 billion.

The talent, money, and business acumen are all here, but Quibi isn’t the only new streaming service to boast those traits. Disney+, which launched last November, continues to enjoy a seemingly endless surge in popularity despite its comparable dearth of original content, and that issue will be remedied when “The Mandalorian” Season 2 and various Marvel Cinematic Universe shows make their way to the platform. And then there’s WarnerMedia’s upcoming HBO Max and NBCUniversal’s Peacock, which are slated to launch in May and July, respectively. Those streaming services’ debuts will only intensify the streaming wars.

Thankfully, Quibi is offering a particularly generous 90-day free trial for early adopters, and a yearlong subscription is available for free to select T-Mobile customers. An ad-supported version of Quibi costs $4.99 per month, while the ad-free version runs $7.99 per month. Will Quibi’s “quick bites” be worth chewing on in three months’ time? That’s what Hollywood has been debating for the last two years. No one knows for certain, but we’ll find out soon enough.

Why, amid the stay-at-home COVID-19 crisis, is Quibi limiting itself only to the smallest screens in the house?

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the movie mogul who founded Quibi, has maintained that the mobile-only approach — delivering premium content in snackable episodes of under 10 minutes throughout the day — gives it a use case and value proposition that’s very distinct from other subscription VOD players like Netflix.

“Mobile video is the white space,” he told me in an interview last year.

That may or may not be true (given the flood of free and popular short-form stuff on Instagram, TikTok, YouTube and Facebook). But by fencing itself off in that white space, Quibi is by definition limiting its addressable market. That was already true before the coronavirus struck, and the inability to stream Quibi’s programming to TVs looks like an even more acute shortcoming now.

Quibi launched April 6, with the app going live around midnight ET with a free 90-day offer for anyone in the U.S. (and free for one year to some T-Mobile customers). Consumers have come to expect subscription-video services to be available across all platforms — TV, web and mobile — and on social media, some were in disbelief by Quibi’s mobile-only restriction.

“I was excited about this platform and then I read it’s only to be viewed on your phone? Is this shit for real?” one commenter on Twitter said. “I don’t even want it for free now. What a waste. Reminds me of when I’d watch shows on my ipod. So backward.”

Another Quibi observer wrote, “It would be wise to allow TV or else playback via HDMI. It’s a shame to be limited by the size of the phone screen.” And then there’s this comment: “Like what the hell are you thinking? Adapt the business model and allow web access during the pandemic.”

It’s a good bet Martin Scorsese disapproves as well. “I would suggest — if you ever want to see one of my pictures, or most films — please, please don’t look at it on a phone, please,” he told an interviewer last year, while discussing his mob epic “The Irishman” for Netflix.

Quibi has invested somewhere around $1 billion on content (and raised $1.75 billion) so far, from big-name directors including Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro, Antoine Fuqua, Sam Raimi, Catherine Hardwicke and Peter Farrelly. And you won’t be able to watch their Quibi movies on a big HDTV, much less a movie screen. (Under Quibi’s licensing model, creator partners have the right to “reassemble” the episodes into a single movie for distribution in another window — after two years.)

Quibi execs, in explaining the mobile-only rationale, also have said that as a built-for-mobile streaming service, the content is designed to only be experienced on smartphones and tablets. The company has touted its Turnstyle feature that automatically adjusts the video stream to either full-screen portrait or landscape mode, depending on how you hold the phone (which, by the way, Quibi is being sued over). But it’s hard to see why Quibi couldn’t have produced some kind of director’s cut that you could watch on non-mobile screens.

On a separate front, others expressed frustration that Quibi is available only in the U.S., although Quibi isn’t alone in geo-fencing content (note, for example, that HBO’s huge free-streaming promotion is a U.S.-only event).

To be fair, those complaining about Quibi’s mobile limitation could amount to only a few squeaky wheels. Other early adopters of the app have posted enthusiastic comments about watching shows and movies like drama “Survive” starring Sophie Turner and Corey Hawkins, “Most Dangerous Game” starring Liam Hemsworth and Christoph Waltz, “Punk’d” hosted by Chance the Rapper, “Thanks a Million” from Jennifer Lopez, “Chrissy’s Court” starring Chrissy Teigen, and home-renovation comedy “Flipped” starring Will Forte and Kaitlin Olson. (See the lineup of Quibi’s 50 shows available at launch.)

At some point, Quibi CEO Meg Whitman told me, users will be able to cast shows from their phones to TVs. But that’s not in the product right now. The bottom line is that Quibi surely could have pulled in bigger audiences if it had gone cross-platform from the get-go.

“It will offer more chances for people to experiment with new subject matter. It’s not a commitment,” said Cecilia Dean, cofounder of Visionaire, which has been commissioned to deliver the series. Filming starts in March.

The avant-garde media firm plans to home in on six fashion workers — and not those at the pinnacle — to demonstrate how dynamic and demanding the industry is behind the scenes. Subjects have yet to be selected, but Visionaire’s initial wish list includes a seamstress, fit model, set designer and music consultant. 

“If someone masters a skill, you can succeed in the fashion industry. I think that’s really telling for an industry considered to be elitist,” Dean said in an interview. “And we understand the huge effort and toil that fashion requires.”

Indeed, this deep dive behind the scenes should engender appreciation for what really goes into making a designer garment, thereby subliminally sending a sustainability message. Dean said she hopes viewers might “think twice about throwing out a jacket — or buy something and treasure it more.”

Founded by Hollywood producer Jeffrey Katzenberg and helmed by former eBayexecutive Meg Whitman, Quibi is slated to launch in April with 7,000 pieces of “news and information content that covers drama, comedy, lifestyle, fashion, beauty, entertainment, culture, sports and everything in between,” according to Gina Stikes, the firm’s head of corporate communications. She said the forthcoming platform is interested in fashion ” because it drives culture, and it’s no secret that Millennials, who are Quibi’s audience, are shaping today’s trends in the fashion industry. Visionaire’s fashion series will give Quibi’s audience a rarely seen look at the massive scope of a major fashion house in the palm of their hands.”

The Visionaire-fronted series, still untitled, is the first in fashion that Quibi has revealed. Dean and cofounder James Kaliardos transitioned into film and public art in the past five years, and conscripted the Ron Howard and Brian Grazer-backed production company New Form as a partner in the new series.

It has yet to be decided if episodes will be released in real time, or the entire series at once, Dean noted.

Quibi, also founded by former HP CEO Meg Whitman, will feature video series from A-list Hollywood creators and studios designed exclusively for the mobile platform. Each series will likely be two to four hours long and divided into bite-sized segments of no more than seven to 10 minutes each.

One is a Hollywood horror project to be written and directed by Steven Spielberg, a longtime friend and business associate of Katzenberg, with a working title of Spielberg After Dark.

The Hollywood director also asked Quibi to ensure his series — to have between 10 and 12 chapters — will only be viewed at midnight. So Quibi designed smartphone technology with a clock that will allow Spielberg's series to be viewed only between sundown and sunup, as the smartphone monitors where a user is, what time of the day or night it is, and when sunup and sundown are to occur.

“Steven Spielberg came in and said, 'I have a super scary story...,' but he said, 'I only want people to watch it at midnight,'" Katzenberg recalled. He added that Spielberg during his pitch said, “It’s a creepy idea and when they watch it, I want it to be creepier.”

Katzenberg took the pitch to Whitman and her product team to come up with a way to allow viewing after sunset and until the sun comes up the next day. The solution is to tag the content so that it is tied to a clock that ticks down to sunset and then ticks up to when the sun comes up, according to the smartphone’s geographic location.

"So he said, 'OK, let’s do it,'" Katzenberg said of Spielberg’s reaction to the Quibi technological solution.

Once Quibi is up and running, the digital startup plans to launch eight "super-premium" movies offered in bited-size chunks during an initial two-week free-preview period. Quibi will then roll out another 26 "lighthouse" or signature movies like The Handmaid's Tale on Hulu and House of Cards on Netflix every other Monday during the first year of the service.

The digital startup will spend around $1 billion on content in its first year, and another $470 million in marketing and promotion. "It's a big bet, and a high bar," Katzenberg said during his keynote address at the Banff World Media Festival.

He predicted Netflix, Amazon and Hulu and other streaming giants will continue to dominate the online video space, but that consumers currently only watch video series on smartphones about 10 percent of the time. So that will leave Quibi as the only premium digital platform for mobile content, after YouTube launched as a platform for user-generated content before becoming a viewing option for far more cheaply-produced shortform content.

"No one is doing what we're doing today," Katzenberg told the Banff delegates, as he predicted consumers that already watch shortform content on the go will choose to upgrade to Quibi as a premium form of bite-sized content.

"We're no more competing with them [streaming giants] than Spotify is competing with them. ... What we're doing is taking what is a tried-and-true form of consumption and now offering people a premium version of it," Katzenberg insisted.

To illustrate the economic model for Quibi, the veteran Hollywood player pointed to #Freerayshawn, a drama series from Sony TV starring Stephan James and Laurence Fishburne and which Antoine Fuqua is currently shooting in New Orleans. The project will be two-and-a-half hours long and broken into 15 chapters ranging from seven to 10 minutes.

"We pay cost plus 20 percent, up to $6 million an hour to make the show," Katzenberg said. "It's a lighthouse show for us. It's $15 million. We pay the cost of the show, 100 percent, and some extra costs to get the stars in the show," he added.

And, typical of Quibi series, Fuqua will edit two versions of #Freerayshawn. The first version will be for Quibi and have 15 chapters, and will be licensed to Katzenberg and Whitman's platform exclusively for seven years.

After that period, the rights to the series will revert back to Fuqua and his partners at Sony TV. At the same time, a second version of #Freerayshawn will be edited as more of a traditional movie, likely around two hours in length and designed to be viewed during a single sitting.

Two years after the first version streams on Quibi, Fuqua and his team will be able to sell their second movie version globally, likely to streaming platforms like Apple, Netflix or Amazon looking for premium content.

"The value of that is going to be pretty extreme, and I know that because people have already approached those creating content for us," Katzenberg said. Quibi will likely be priced at $4.99 a month with short ads, and $7.99 without them.

After its North American launch early next year, the video venture will roll out to English-speaking markets worldwide before going global. The Quibi full-screen video service is also being designed to be viewed in either portrait or landscape mode on smartphones.

The Banff World Media Festival continues through Wednesday in the Canadian Rockies.

The platform launches next April and Katzenberg said they are going to release a new series every Monday. The two pulled back the curtain to give us more insight to what we can expect from the platform which already has names This includes an origin series for Telemundo’s wildly popular film El Señor de los Cielos, a music competition show hosted by Scooter Braun as well as a reality series from Jennifer Lopez’s Nuyorican Productions titled Thanks a Million which will feature people literally paying it forward to people who have changed their life. Quibi will also have a docuseries called The Frat Boy Genius which will follow the story of Snapchat creator Evan Spiegel. They also mentioned Sam Raimi’s 50 State of Fear which will feature the scariest story in every state in the country.

In addition, Quibi will feature short-form news programming from a millennial-friendly host as well as global news at noon from the BBC. They will also feature music news and a “best of late night” program. Katzenberg looks to “make information convenient as Spotify made music convenient.”

Even though they have grand plans to change the short-form content consumption game, the panel’s moderator NBC News & MSNBC’s Dylan Byers was questioning whether or not the platform would be successful. At one point, Katzenberg jokingly said, “we’re selling our ass off here!” while trying to convince Byers of its viability. The two have been on a Quibi hustle and Austin was one of three cities they have been in today just to talk about the buzzy platform.

Despite Byers’s doubt, the pair, gave an argument for why Quibi will be synonymous with short-form content like Kleenex is synonymous with tissue and Google is with search engines. 

“We are bringing the best of Silicon Valley and the best of Hollywood,” said Whitman. She adds that it is the first entertainment platform of its kind and is quick bite content (hence the name) created by Hollywood’s top talent.

“It makes video on mobile devices engaging,” she said.

The platform takes long-form content and breaks it into little bits. Essentially, it will be one long story told in chapters and Katzenberg understands Quibi is “improbable and impossible” but remains confident in the product, saying that he lives at the intersection of improbable and impossible. Nothing like this has been done before and he says it’s tough to be judgmental about its success because there is nothing to compare it to. “It’s hard to ask someone’s opinion about something they haven’t experienced.”

With Whitman and Katzenberg leading the charge and eight entertainment studios investing, things are looking optimistic for Quibi. Katzenberg says that the studios are going to give the best showrunning talent and promises that the content will “attain a level of quality that has never been seen before.”

“Five years from now we want to come back to this stage and have it be the era of Quibi,” said Katzenberg.

Byers volunteers to interview him at that time and Katzenberg fires back playfully saying, “I’m going to interview you!” calling him a “doubting motherf*cker” and imagining the conversation five years from now which he will ask, “What was wrong with you?”

In the end, Byers said he was doubtful at the beginning of the panel, but is now less doubtful.

Filmmakers Sam Raimi, Guillermo del Toro and Antoine Fuqua and noted producer Jason Blum will all create shows for the new mobile subscription service, which launches next year. 

“These people are so excited about doing something new. They want to be the pioneers. They want to be able to show the path in doing this,” said Katzenberg. “We are going to do be able to do extraordinary storytelling.”

Whitman announced the service will be called Quibi, short for quick bites of content.

“Jeffrey can’t stop saying the name Quibi,” Whitman said. “I think that will be a fun name for us.”

Katzenbenberg talked about his rationale for the startup, which has secured an initial round of $1 billion. He said people leave the house each day with a television in their pockets — their smartphones; and they’re devoting 70 minutes a day watching videos from these ubiquitous portable screens.

YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and Snap all have created an appetite for mobile video, and helped to establish a powerful daily habit. Now, mobile video is ready for its HBO moment — a time for a new player to step in and reinvent mobile video with high-quality content from Hollywood’s top talent.

“We think is a spectacular new opportunity,” Katzenberg said.

Katzenberg approached Whitman to join him in the venture last November, when the veteran tech executive announced she would depart as chief executive of Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

“Jeffrey read about this and literally, within five minutes, he was on the phone and said, ‘Hey, I’d like you to join me in NewTV,” Whitman recalled.

“She said, ‘I’m going on vacation.’ I said, ‘Can I have dinner with you tomorrow night before you go?” recounted Katzenberg.

That dinner didn’t happen — but Whitman said she was sold on Katzenberg’s vision and the timing of the venture, which she sees as capitalizing on powerful market trends.

“There’s a very clear white space in terms of short form content under 10 minutes, what we call quick bites, delivered to mobile platform,” said Whitman, who first met Katzenberg 30 years ago when they both worked at The Walt Disney Co.

The duo divvied up the labor, with Whitman focused on building out the business and setting corporate culture, while Katzenberg cultivated the content community and selling Hollywood on the notion of serialized, movie-length stories, told in bursts of 10 or 20 minutes.

Katzenberg said Raimi, who first came to the attention of film fans with the savage, yet darkly humorous, low-budget horror film, The Evil Dead, is developing a project titled 50 States of Fear with producer Van Toffler. It aims to tell scary stories from each state in the U.S.

Fuqua is developing a project that Katzenberg described as a modern-day version of Dog Day Afternoon. Blum pitched a project called Wolves and Villagers, which Katzenberg said explores th same sexy terrain as Fatal Attraction.

Academy Award-winning director del Toro is writing a modern zombie story.

The service will be a two-tiered subscription model analogous to that of Hulu, targeting viewers ages 25 to 35. The lower-priced version will have select advertising. Pricing has not been determined, but the goal is to make it “affordable for a diverse group of viewers.”

It’s unclear how the venture will fare against more entrenched players, such as Netflix, whose movies and TV shows already play on mobile devices, and mobile native apps like Snapchat, which just announced its first slate of programming.

Katzenberg appeared to welcome the increasingly crowded mobile marketplace, describing it as creating momentum — literally wind beneath the sails — for his new venture. But he acknowledged the challenge ahead is large.

“Doing this falls somewhere between improbable and impossible,” said Katzenberg, who referred to himself and Whitman as “old dogs” with a new trick, raising objections from his business partner. “We’ve been to the rodeo a whole bunch of times. That play, between improbable and impossible, that’s my home address.”

Hollywood similarly been sold on Katzenberg’s vision, and the opportunity to learn about mobile storytelling in a form of experimentation that allows them to develop and keep their intellectual property.

The backers include such Hollywood players as Disney, eOne, Fox, ITV, Lionsgate, MGM, NBCUniversal, Sony Pictures, Viacom, and WarnerMedia. Technology investors include e-commerce giant Alibaba. Strategic partner investors include Goldman Sachs, JPMorgan Chase, Liberty Global and Madrone Capital, the last of which led the round.

The product, temporarily called NewTV, will "access the best talent and intellectual property for this next era in entertainment," Katzenberg, chairman and founder of NewTV, said in a statement.

Katzenberg and his investors, which also include Fox, Viacom, Sony Pictures, Lionsgate and MGM, are banking on an untapped audience that craves high-quality content designed for smartphones and tablets. Bloomberg reported in May that a NewTV series will cost about $5 million to $6 million per hour with individual episodes that run about 15 minutes.

The investment announcement comes on the heels of Verizon shutting down its go90 mobile streaming service after it failed to gain traction with the public. The conceit of that product was also to provide quality video series for a mobile audience.

"With NewTV, we'll give consumers a user-friendly platform, built for mobile, that delivers the best stories, created by the world's top talent, allowing users to make the most of every moment of their day," said Whitman, NewTV's CEO.

NewTV's platform is owned by Katzenberg's holding company WndrCo.

—CNBC's Julia Boorstin contributed to this report.

Disclosure: NBCUniversal is the parent company of CNBC.

The proposed New TV, which Katzenberg told CNBC will cost about $2 billion to launch, will feature original shows. Episodes will be no longer than 10 minutes in length, but retain the high production values and quality people expect from traditional television.

Variety first reported that shows will not have ad breaks, but instead use title sponsors and brand integrations in episodes. There is no launch date as of yet.

Top producers J.J. Abrams, Ron Howard, Mark Burnett and Jerry Bruckheimer have been interested in working on projects, Katzenberg said. He also has deals to license custom content from Disney, FOX, CBS and Lionsgate.

The cost may seem high, but sources told CNBC that Katzenberg has met with Apple, Google, AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Snapchat and Spotify executives for funding. Based on potential partners, there may be a free ad-supported model as well as a paid subscription service, sources added.

Additional reporting by Julia Boorstin.

NBCUniversal is the parent compan

NBCUniversal is the parent compan