On the morning of October 21, 2020, Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman logged onto a video call to tell roughly 200 employees that Quibi — the mobile-only streaming app that had raised $1.75 billion from nearly every major Hollywood studio — was shutting down. It had been six and a half months since launch day. This is the story of how one of the most heavily funded startups in American media history burned through almost all of that money in under seven months.

This documentary covers the full rise and fall of Quibi: Jeffrey Katzenberg's post-Disney, post-DreamWorks pitch for "quick bites" of mobile video, Meg Whitman coming aboard as CEO fresh off running eBay and Hewlett-Packard, the studio-by-studio fundraising that pulled in money from Disney, NBCUniversal, WarnerMedia, Sony, and half of Wall Street, the "Turnstyle" video technology unveiled at CES, marquee shows built around Chrissy Teigen, Reese Witherspoon, Sophie Turner, and Liam Hemsworth, and the launch date — April 6, 2020 — that landed square in the middle of a pandemic lockdown, killing the entire "watch it on your commute" premise the app was built around. It covers the missing cast-to-TV support and screenshot feature that became the app's most-mocked flaws, the roughly 8% free-trial-to-paid conversion rate that doomed the business model, the failed sale talks with Apple, Facebook, and WarnerMedia, the October 2020 shutdown announcement, and the eventual sale of Quibi's content library to Roku for a small fraction of what it cost to make.

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