Quibi content is officially addressed to Roku.
It seems like a month or so 100 years since we found out than the short-lived transmission experiment of Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman it crashed and burned about six months after its rocky release. But Quibi had managed to produce a significant amount of original content before and after its release, content with big, splattered Hollywood names and studios. Earlier this week, the Wall Street Journal reported that Roku was in talks to pick up all this 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 exceeded the total 200 hours of programming. Roku said that in addition to the titles that previously lived on the Quibi platform, more than a dozen new Quibi items will debut on the Roku channel for the first time. In acquiring Quibi’s library, Roku evidently also brought Quibi’s Twitter ghost from the grave:
While the content will be free for Roku users, it will be advertising. Prior to his untimely death, Quibi featured free, ad-free models, but it makes sense that Roku would like to recoup some of what he’s spending on content (though that figure wasn’t disclosed). Although the company did not specify which titles previously lived on the Quibi platform would get a second life on the Roku channel, the company said the talent included Anna Kendrick, Chrissy Teigen and Liam Hemsworth, among others.
Undoubtedly, it is possible that the Quibi library can succeed on the Roku channel without all the demands Turnstyle technology nonsense i forced mobile display. One of Quibi’s biggest problems has always been that it was a video service intended for motion display, which frankly no one did much when Quibi launched into a pandemic. Roku claims to have reached 61.8 million people on its platform, and with very little new content being released right now, the Quibi catalog can offer something new for people who spend more time in front of their TVs than would be normal.
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It’s unclear exactly when the Quibi list will hit the Roku channel, but the company said yes sometime in 2021.