Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg told The New York Times that the app will soon allow users to share its content on social platforms.- Quibi currently does not allow users to screenshot its content, making it difficult for people to make viral
memes and raise awareness about the platform. - The app has struggled with attaining downloads in the first month since its launch, falling out of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the App Store within a week of launch.
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Quibi memes have been nearly non-existent since the streaming app's launch on April 6, but more Quibi content could find it's way onto social media following a New York Times interview with the platform's founder Jeffrey Katzenberg, who announced that the company would soon introduce sharing features geared towards social.
The platform has been struggling to amass downloads in the first month since its launch on April 6. Sensor Tower reported that the app had only been installed by 2.9 million customers, according to the Times, while Quibi says that it has been installed by closer to 3.5 million. Quibi said that 1.3 million of those users are considered to be active. The app fell out of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the App Store within a week of its launch.
While Katzenberg told the Times that he "[attributes] everything that has gone wrong to coronavirus," the app drew criticism early on for users' inability to take screenshots of Quibi programming, as was previously reported by Business Insider's Paige Leskin. As Quibi competes with streaming platforms like Netflix and short-form video apps like TikTok for users' attention, the inability to easily meme Quibi's content was a significant cultural blow. While Netflix leans into online social media chatter about its content, Quibi effectively cut down any potential organic chatter about its programming online before it could even start.
In fact, the only viral Twitter meme involving Quibi content appears to have been recorded using a separate cell phone than the one that the program itself was playing on. For many online users, that's too much effort.
That doesn't mean that the app hasn't tried to incite meme discourse online. A Quibi tweet from April 30 stated that the platform had put the first episode of "Dummy," an Anna Kendrick-led program in which her character discovers that her husband owns a sex doll, on YouTube, asking the Internet to "meme away."
—quibi (@Quibi) April 30, 2020
Katzenberg seemed to acknowledge that the inability to share on social was an oversight.
"There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right," Katzenberg told the New York Times, "but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, 'Uh-oh, we didn't see that.'"
It's unclear at this point whether the new social media features will prove to be a boon for the struggling platform, particularly given the fact that critics haven't taken to its programming and others argue that it isn't worth the minimum $5 a month it'll cost after the end of a user's 90-day free trial. CEO Meg Whitman told Deadline in an article published on May 11 that despite the fact that no Quibi show has managed to break into the zeitgeist, "our content is resonating... We're pretty pleased with where we are."
Insider has reached out to Quibi for additional details regarding the ways that the app will allow users to share its content on social media platforms and will update with any new information.
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- Quibi made its content screenshot-proof, but the platform could lose valuable viewers without widely shared memes of its shows
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