A month before launch, the Quibi streaming app announced it had completed a second round of $ 750 million, raising its total fundraising to $ 1.75 billion, the company announced on Wednesday, media reports said. Anglo-Saxon. At the Consumer electronic show in Las Vegas (CES) in January, the company co-founded by Meg Whitman and Jeffrey Katzenberg had already announced that they had raised $ 1.4 billion.
"We want to be sure that we will have the means to build a business over the long term," said Meg Whitman, CEO of Quibi, to the Wall Street Journal . The bet is daring. The aim is to develop a premium offer of short videos (no more than 10 minutes) on mobiles and intended for millennials. Everything will be paid ($ 4.99 per month with ad and 7.99 without) and viewable in landscape or portrait mode.
Alibaba and Disney among investors
The project has attracted large investors. Among the first to bet on the new project of the former boss of Hewlett Packard and the former founder of Dreamworks, include Alibaba, Disney, NBCUniversal, Viacom or Goldman Sachs. The app also claims to have sold all of its advertising inventory for 2020 for $ 150 million to major advertisers.
At CES, Quibi, who will launch on April 6 in the United States, has detailed his roadmap. Either the broadcast of 175 shows (including 50 at launch) and 8,500 new episodes during its first year of operation. Enough to feed subscribers with three hours of new programs every day.
This Netflix short version appealed to "the biggest names in Hollywood", like Steven Spielberg, Guillermo del Toro or the Russo brothers. "Within three months of our launch, we should have understood what our customers love ... and we will easily adapt our content accordingly," said Meg Whitman.
Quibi aims to recruit between 11 million (very conservative scenario) and 70 million (optimistic scenario) subscribers in five years. For the moment, video applications targeting young people on smartphones have not met the hoped-for success, in particular overwhelmed by the TikTok tsunami.