Roku has acquired the global distribution rights to Quibi’s content for the rest of 2021, reportedly buying the full slate for less than $100m.
Details
- First reported by the Wall Street Journal, Roku will display the short-form specialist’s shows in its Roku Channel, which is ad-supported.
- In total, it comes to just over 75 different programmes, including shows like Barkitecture (about expensive kennels), Murder House Flip (somewhere between true crime and home improvement) and a newly revived Punk’d.
- Interestingly, one of the terms of the deal is that the content must remain short-form, Quibi’s intended selling point, with Roku unable to string segments together.
A mix of bad luck and restrictive decisions
For a platform intended to be consumed mostly on mobile devices, that Quibi launched in April of 2020, when lockdowns were in place across the US, was tough.
But there were other problems, as GroupM’s Brian Weiser explained in December, when he described Quibi as “a disaster from the start”.
“Quibi was fixated on a concept that is pretty-well disproven in having any legs, and they launched the product without proof of concept. Thati’s really unheard of,” said the media agency’s Global President of Business Intelligence.
Sourced from the Wall Street Journal, WARC
