Quibi’s content is officially going to Roku.
It seems like a month or about 100 years since we found out that the short-lived streaming experiment by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman fell and burned about six months after its rocky launch. But Quibi was able to produce a significant amount of original content before and after its release – content with big names and associated Hollywood studios. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Roku was in negotiations to grab all that content for the Roku Channel. Now it’s official.
Roku announced today that the Roku Channel will become the exclusive home of more than 75 series and documentaries produced by Quibi, which the company told Gizmodo, add up to more than 200 hours of programming. Roku said that in addition to titles that already existed on the Quibi platform, more than a dozen new Quibi clubs will debut on the Roku Channel for the first time. Upon acquiring Quibi’s library, Roku evidently also brought Quibi’s Twitter ghost back from the grave:
Although the content is free to broadcast to Roku users, it will be ad-supported. Before his untimely death, Quibi presented free models without ads, but it makes sense that Roku wants to recover part of what he is spending on transporting content (although that number has not been released). Although the company did not specify which titles that previously lived on the Quibi platform would have a second life on the Roku Channel, the company said that the talents included Anna Kendrick, Chrissy Teigen and Liam Hemsworth, among others.
It is certainly possible that the Quibi library could succeed on the Roku Channel without all the hustle and bustle Turnstyle technology absurd and forced mobile viewing. One of Quibi’s biggest problems has always been that it was a video service made for viewing anywhere, which, frankly, no one was doing much when Quibi was launched in the middle of a pandemic. Roku says it has reached 61.8 million people on its platform, and with very little new content debuting now, Quibi’s catalog may offer something new to people who spend more time in front of their TVs than they would normally be.
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It is unclear exactly when Quibi’s list will reach the Roku Channel, but the company said it will in 2021.