Quibi’s (considerable) loss is Roku’s gain.
Eleven weeks after Quibi announced it was ending what turned out to be an eight-month experiment in streaming “quick bites” of TV and film programming, Roku snatched the short-service library with more than 75 programs.
Roku will launch Quibi shows later this year, starting in the United States, Canada and the United Kingdom.
Among the purchased contents are what Quibi called “Chapter Movies”, including Most Dangerous Game starring Liam Hemsworth, Inverted starring Will Forte and Kaitlyn Olson, and When the street lights come on starring Chosen Jacobs. In addition, there were regular TV series (like Kiefer Sutherland’s The Fugitive restart) and a myriad of scripted programs (including Chrissy Court with “judge” Chrissy Teigen).
As for the “Films in Chapters”, in which the feature films ran for about eight minutes a day, Quibi gave producers the right to re-assemble the episodes in films for distribution on other platforms.
But perhaps the remotely interesting element here is that Roku will claim some series that never made it to Quibi. These, through our sister site Variety, include After Dark by Spielberg, a series of horror that would only be available to watch when it was dark outside; Peter Farrelly’s The now, about a suicidal man who has to “learn to live the life of today, of now”; and Slugfest, a series of documentaries by the Russian Brothers of the MCU that would chronicle the growth of comics as an American art form.
Not Included in the Roku agreement are the new “Daily Essentials” programs that never went off the paper as Quibi intended, due to the pandemic.