Quibi’s content is officially on its way to Roku.
It feels like a month or about 100 years since we found out that the short-lived streaming experiment of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman crashed and burned about six short months after its rocky launch. But Quibi has managed to erase a significant amount of original content before and after the launch – content with big, brand new Hollywood names and studios. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal report that Roku was in talks to record all the content for the Roku Channel. Now it’s official.
Roku announced today that the Roku Channel will become the exclusive home for 75+ series and documentaries produced by Quibi, which according to the company to Gizmodo is more than 200 hours of programming. According to Roku, in addition to titles that previously lived on the Quibi platform, more than a dozen new Quibi joints will debut on the Roku channel for the first time. Upon acquiring Quibi’s library, Roku apparently also brought Quibi’s Twitter ghost back from the grave:
Although the content may flow for free to Roku users, it will be ad supported. Before his untimely death, Quibi offered both free and ad-free models, but it is logical that Roku wants to recoup some of the spending on the table of contents (although the figure has not been released). Although the company did not specify which titles previously on the Quibi platform would get a second life on the Roku Channel, the company said it included Anna Kendrick, Chrissy Teigen and Liam Hemsworth, among others.
It is quite possible that Quibi’s library can succeed on the Roku Channel without all the effort Turnstyle technology nonsense and forced mobile viewing. One of Quibi’s biggest problems has always been that it was a video service that was watched on the go, which honestly 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 could offer something new for people who spend more time in front of their TVs than they normally would.
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It is not clear exactly when the Quibi roster will pick up the Roku channel, but the company said it will. be somewhere in 2021.