Hi, I'm Dan Fromak and welcome to Axios Recap, presented by Facebook.

Today is Thursday, October 22nd.

Weekly jobless claims are down, home sales and home prices are up, and we're focused on the quick rise and steep fall of Quibi.

Quibi, okay, where to start? Probably with what it is or was because the

lack of consumer interest became a big part of the problem. Quibi was basically the brainchild of

Jeffrey Katzenberg, the one-time head of Disney Studios and DreamWorks. It was a video streaming

app for scripted content, but instead of 30-minute or hour-long programs,

each episode would be a maximum of 10 minutes, short form, with Katzenberg believing it could

become the video version of a Dan Brown novel, quick, addictive chapters, preferably with

cliffhangers.

Katzenberg then hired former eBay and HP CEO Meg Whitman

to lead Quibi and raised nearly $2 billion to hire talent. He then set an April 2020 launch date,

which proved to be going right into the pandemic, even though Quibi was primarily designed

for an on-the-go audience. The response from audiences

underwhelming. They didn't connect with the shows. Many didn't even know the shows existed

due to some inexplicably terrible decisions about not allowing things like social sharing or

screenshots. It also didn't help internally that Katzenberg and Whitman, who'd known each other for decades, rarely saw eye-to-eye.

So now Quibi is shutting down, with Meg Whitman telling this to CNBC.

The honorable thing to do is to return money to shareholders when we knew this was not going to have a path forward as a viable stand-alone business.

Katzenberg was also on that CNBC interview, taking responsibility for the failure.

When asked if he'd temper an earlier statement in which he blamed the pandemic for Quibi's

flop, he said this.

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