Quibi’s zombie may be able to finally rest his tired head. The company’s successor has resolved an ongoing dispute with the eternal Eko thorn.
Eko, an interactive video company, and Quibi’s successor, QBI Holdings, announced today that they had reached an agreement in the legal battle over Quibi’s perspective-changing Turnstyle feature, which Eko alleged that the service broadcast had gone from its own video technology. Both companies have agreed to dismiss their lawsuits against each other and Quibi will hand over both video technology and Turnstyle IP to Eko as part of its deal.
“This result will help ensure that Eko remains the undisputed leader in interactive narrative technology,” Eko chief Yoni Bloch said in a statement.
Quibi was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and debuted last year amid a plethora of streaming releases. The first mobile service was designed to adapt to the intermediate moments of the train or while waiting in line when users had time to kill their phones, with Quibi offering high-quality “quick bite” videos with support of prominent creators. and talent from List A.
The problem was that the service was launched in the middle of the pandemic when those spectators on the march he hoped to find were trapped inside. At first, reluctant to implement casting support, the service struggled to keep paying subscribers. Quibi was plagued by countless problems until its untimely demise less than a year after its release, including, among other things, its ongoing legal battles against Eko.
Eko, an interactive storytelling platform, claimed that Quibi stole the idea of its Turnstyle technology that allowed Quibi users to see certain perspectives from a title based on the orientation of their phone in portrait mode or horizontal. Eko called Quibi’s technology “an almost identical copy of its own, from the patented intelligent video response system to the way files are created, formatted, and stored.” Eko received a patent for its own video technology in October 2019.
Quibi finally closed in December and Roku was introduced to collect the IP remains of his corpse for his own broadcast service, The Roku Channel. But he left behind Turnstyle technology and its legal issues, which went unresolved earlier this week.
In a statement, Katzenberg said his field was “satisfied with the outcome of this litigation and proud of the contributions of Quibi and its engineering team to independently created content presentation technology.” If anyone had really used it.