Quibi Holdings LLC weighs shutting itself down: Dow Jones

Yahoo Finance's Dan Howley joins Akiko Fujita to discuss the future of online streaming platform Quibi.

Video Transcript

AKIKO FUJITA: Dan, one company that is not performing well is Quibi. And we've got those reports that it could potentially be looking to shut down its service. The information last night reporting that the company had approached the likes of NBC and Facebook to try and find somebody to buy up the platform.

I mean, this is an app that raised nearly $2 billion even before it was launched. What's going wrong for the platform? And what do you think is the future? Who could potentially be a buyer?

DAN HOWLEY: I mean, what-- you know, what isn't going wrong? I mean, the whole idea, in my opinion, is flawed from the get-go. We have Netflix. We have Hulu. It's not that we don't need or don't want more streaming services, but don't feed them to me in these little chunks. People want to be able to watch what they want to watch. There is a pause button on Netflix or Disney Plus or Hulu, and you can go back to those if you don't have time to watch things necessarily.

So the whole idea for Quibi was kind of just flawed from the get-go. And I think that the reason that it obviously got the funding that it did and the stars that it did was because of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, to a degree. And obviously, Katzenberg though, with the big Hollywood ties is the reason why they managed to get so many players in there.

But I don't see this really succeeding. I didn't see it succeeding from, like I said, the get-go. It just seemed like a strange app that nobody really was too interested in. And, you know, according to this report, they only have a few 100,000 subscribers when they were hoping for millions. So it's not working out.

And, you know, like you said, they reached out to NBC, they reached out to Apple, and nobody seems to have interest. So I just don't see this continuing if it's a money losing venture on the level that it is. They did get some of their programming recognized for awards, but you know, that's not going to do anything if nobody's actually watching.