Quibi fell out of the list of the 50 most downloaded free iPhone apps in the United States a week after it went live on April 6. It is now ranked No. 125, behind the game app Knock’em All and the language-learning app Duolingo, according to the analytics firm Sensor Tower.
Even with a free 90-day trial, the app has been installed by only 2.9 million customers, according to Sensor Tower. Quibi says the figure is more like 3.5 million. Of those who have installed the app, the company says 1.3 million are active users.
Mr. Katzenberg, 69, and Ms. Whitman, 63, the former Hewlett-Packard chief, raised nearly $1.8 billion from Hollywood studios and the Chinese e-commerce giant Alibaba for Quibi. They pitched it as an app designed to match how people consumed media now — on their phones during slow moments, while they commuted or waited in line.
Mr. Katzenberg said: Quibi will be less walled off from the internet, and users will be able to share its content on social media platforms.
“There are a whole bunch of things we have now seen in the product that we thought we got mostly right,” he said, “but now that there are hundreds of people on there using it, you go, ‘Uh-oh, we didn’t see that.’”
Quibi placed a large bet on news programming for a lineup of shows from NBC, BBC, Telemundo and ESPN that it filed under the name Daily Essentials. Interest in those segments has been minimal.
“The Daily Essentials are not that essential,” Mr. Katzenberg quipped.
A tech company, Eko, accuses Quibi of misappropriating trade secrets and infringing on the patent for the technology that allows viewers to shift seamlessly between horizontal and vertical viewing. The activist hedge fund Elliott Management has committed to funding a lawsuit filed by Eko.
A recent report found that Quibi had given away its customers’ email addresses without their knowledge. “As soon as we heard about it, we fixed it,” Mr. Katzenberg said.
As Zoom and TikTok top the app charts, Mr. Katzenberg and other Quibi executives have been working on reducing their projections from the seven million users and $250 million in subscriber revenue they had estimated for Quibi’s first year. With television and film production shut down almost entirely, Quibi has also decided to slow the pace of its new releases so it will be able to offer fresh content until the start of 2021.
When asked if the success of TikTok gave him pause, considering that it is also a platform built on short-form video, albeit of the user-generated variety, Mr. Katzenberg seemed momentarily steamed.
“That’s like comparing apples to submarines,” he said. “I don’t know what people are expecting from us. What did Netflix look like 30 days after it launched? To tell me about a company that has a billion users and is doing great in the past six weeks, I’m happy for them, but what the hell does it have to do with me?”