Quibi, the curious “TV on your phone” service that lasted about six months last year, will soon be on the air – like a free channel with ads on Roku.
After rumors started circulating earlier this week, Quibi and Roku confirmed on Friday that the two companies had reached an agreement for an acquisition, placing most of Quibi’s original programming hours in Roku’s hands. Most of the Quibi service involved scripted series, along with documentary and reality TV content, and Roku will present these series on a dedicated Roku “channel” later this year, while Quibi’s previous “daily” news episodes did not. will be part of the business.
Surprisingly, it is not just an agreement for last year’s content. Whatever has been done previously as part of Quibi’s portfolio of talent and producers seems to be back on the table, with Roku telling users to expect “more than a dozen new programs” that had not previously been released in the Quibi app. in 2020. Roku did not use today’s ads to clarify what the schedule is, but Variety classifies many of the shows as documentary miniseries, along with a horror series written by Steven Spielberg that originally would only be available for streaming overnight.
As the deal revolves entirely around “content distribution rights”, Roku will not acquire anything in Quibi’s technology portfolio, including the “ratchet” system used to alter the content and formatting of the video based on how the viewer holds the smartphone screen – a pretty decent trick for viewing portable video, I discovered in my tests last year.
Just under $ 1.75 billion
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Remembering how Quibi used to be: All episodes were originally edited with two orientation options, since phone users could hold their phones anyway. The selection of Quibi’s press preview was presented in a fun way: with portrait and landscape orientations side by side. We imagine that Roku will only display “landscape” versions on TVs. Here it is Most Dangerous Gamethe selective focus of Christoph Waltz on a scene.
Quibi
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The surprisingly funny Culture Hole puts your image bits into image retrospectively based on how you orient your screen.
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Some moments have totally different footage based on the orientation of the screen, such as Survive starring Sophie Turner (War of Thrones)
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The differences in orientation from other series are more subtle, as in Murder House Flip. That’s where the bodies were buried, if you’re wondering.
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A different zoom for comical effect in Inverted.
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Dance movements appear differently based on the orientation of the screen in The sauce.
Unsurprisingly, neither Roku nor Quibi announced the terms of this acquisition agreement, but trusted Deadline insiders set the deal at “less than $ 100 million”, or at best, 5.7 percent of the valuation $ 1.75 billion original Quibi.
When you consider the hours of Quibi content included in the deal, many of which are full of stars, it is difficult to argue that Roku does not get ahead. The streaming company can now put faces like Christoph Waltz, Idris Elba, Anna Kendrick, Liam Hemsworth and Kevin Hart on the home screen of its standard interface, taking its more than 100 million users to a dedicated and free content channel. And while Quibi was a strange argument for smartphones, with “minisodes” divided into eight minutes of content or less, that length of content could function as an ideal amount of video between ads, following the likes of miniature cable TV networks like Adult Swim.
In a farewell letter to Quibi employees and investors, service co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman offered a frank two-part hunch about why the service did not take off in its original iteration, just for smartphone: “Because the idea itself was not strong enough to justify an independent streaming service or due to our time. “It remains to be seen how many other beginner streaming services suffer the same fate, considering that the nickel-e-diming of new services threatens to undo the simplicity that “cutting the cable” used to imply in switching from cable TV to a service like Netflix. After all, Quibi’s deal with Roku comes just days after Discovery moved forward with its new paid streaming service.
Perhaps Quibi simply had the wrong idea about what type of video content, and ties to his user community, would attract a surprising number of new users and repeat viewers in the year 2020.
Listing image by Quibi