Quibi’s content officially goes to Roku.
It feels like a month or about 100 years ago that we found out that the short-lived streaming experiment of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman crashed and burned about six short months after the rocky launch. But Quibi had managed to produce a significant amount of original content before and after the rollout – content with big, smashing Hollywood names and studios attached to it. The Wall Street Journal was published earlier this week reported that Roku was in talks to capture all that content for the Roku channel. Now it is official.
Roku today announced that the Roku channel will be the exclusive home of 75+ series and documentaries produced by Quibi, which the company said Gizmodo exceeds 200 hours of programming. Roku said that in addition to titles that previously lived on the Quibi platform, more than a dozen new Quibi joints will be released on the Roku channel for the first time. In acquiring Quibi’s library, Roku apparently also brought Quibi’s Twitter ghost back from the grave:
While the content is free to stream for Roku users, it is ad supported. Before his untimely death, Quibi had both free and ad-free models, but it makes sense that Roku would want to recoup some of his expenditures on the table of contents (although that figure was not disclosed). While the company didn’t specify which titles previously living on the Quibi platform would get a second life on the Roku channel, the company said talent included Anna Kendrick, Chrissy Teigen, and Liam Hemsworth, among others.
It’s certainly possible that Quibi’s library could find success on the Roku channel without all the fuss Turnstyle technology nonsense and forced mobile viewing. One of Quibi’s biggest problems has always been that it was a video service made for watching on the go, which frankly, no one did much when Quibi started in the midst of a pandemic. Roku says it has reached 61.8 million people on its platform, and with very little new content currently debuting, Quibi’s catalog may offer something new for people who spend more time in front of their TV than usual.
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It’s not clear exactly when the Quibi roster will hit the Roku channel, but the company said it will sometime in 2021.