Like so many great internet ideas forged in the white heat of enthusiasm, Quibi was short-lived.
It finally shut up shop in December 2020, a casualty of the quickly evaporating mobile-first short-form video trend.
The company was formed in August 2018 and raised $1.75 billion from investors. Their short-form streaming service was rebranded as Quibi launched in April 2020.
However, almost from day one, Quibi was beset with problems. With subscriber projections proving wildly inaccurate and besieged by external troubles, Quibi finally admitted defeat in December 2020.
Weeks later, the Quibi content was sold to Roku for a sum reportedly less than $100 million, a fraction of what investors had fronted up.
Roku launches Quibi content to streamers
Roku announced that they had expanded their video library by acquiring Quibi’s content library to The Roku Channel.
Thanks to the purchase, Roku would now be hosting Emmy-nominated shows such as:
#FreeRayshawn
Die Hart
Flipped
Chrissy’s Court
Most Dangerous Game
Dummy
Reno 911!
Punk’d
Survive
and more
The rollout would mean hundreds of more hours of new content, including Big Stories and Quick Bites. The new Quibi-derived content will be free and in addition to the existing Roku lineup.
The quibi.com website now is merely a landing page for The Roku Channel with a Learn More button linking to the blog announcement on roku.com.
Some of the bottom of the page menu items still work, a sad glimpse of what had gone before.
Initially, pre-launch, everything looked rosy for Quibi. TV networks and financial institutions were queuing up to invest. By the end of 2019, Quibi claimed it had sold out its first year’s worth of advertising, raising some $150 million in the process.
The Quibi service launched on April 6, 2020, in North America, with ad-free versions being launched simultaneously in the UK, select mainland European countries, and Australia. In its launch week, the app was downloaded 1.7 million times and in the top ten download charts.
But the download surge quickly burned out. By early May 2020, the app was languishing at 125th place.
Despite various business and feature tweaks, including a subscription price cut, Quibi continued to struggle to find subscribers. By June 2020, Quibi was reportedly sitting at two million subscribers, well below their projection of 7.4 million.
With the coronavirus pandemic being held partly to blame, it was decided to pull the plug in October 2020, just six months after the launch. Quibi was officially shut down in December 2020 after having spent $1 billion commissioning new content.
Should you be interested in the Quibi content, you can access it via The Roku Channel app, which we discuss below.
Roku app:
Multiple subscription packages
Hundreds of channels and streaming services
Voice search
Supports 4K
Cheaper than a traditional cable provider
Multi-language support
Rates highly on Google Play and Apple’s App Store
Live TV access limited without an additional subscription
Many channels require a monthly payment
Limited options to cast content to smart TVs
