Finally, good news for Quibi



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Quibi’s zombie will finally be able to rest his tired head. The company’s successor has settled an ongoing feud with the perennial thorny Eko.

Eko, an interactive video company, and Quibi’s successor, QBI Holdings, today announced that they have reached a settlement in the legal battle over Quibi’s perspective-changing Turnstyle feature, which Eko has claimed the streaming service had slipped from its own proprietary video technology. The two companies have agreed to dismiss their legal action against each other, and Quibi will hand over both video technology and Turnstyle IP to Eko as part of their deal.

“This result will help ensure that Eko remains the clear leader in interactive storytelling technology,” Eko boss Yoni Bloch said in a statement.

Quibi was founded by Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman and debuted last year amid a flurry of streaming launches. The mobile service first was intended to adapt to intermediate moments on the train or during queues when users had time to kill on their phones, with Quibi offering high production value “quick bite” videos. supported by leading creators. and top talent.

The problem was that the service was launched in the midst of the pandemic when the on-the-go viewers it hoped to find were stuck inside. Initially reluctant to implement casting support, the service struggled to retain paying subscribers. Quibi was plagued by a myriad of issues until its untimely demise less than a year after its launch, including but certainly not limited to its ongoing legal battles against Eko.

Eko, an interactive storytelling platform, claimed that Quibi stole the idea for its Turnstyle technology that allowed Quibi users to view certain perspectives from a title based on their phone’s orientation in mode. portrait or landscape. Eko called Quibi’s technology “its almost identical copy, of the patented intelligent video response system to the way files are created, formatted and stored.” Eko was granted a patent for its own video technology in October 2019.

Quibi finally closed in December, and Roku stepped in to retrieve the IP remains of his corpse for his own streaming service, The Roku Channel. But he left Turnstyle technology and its legal issues behind, which remained unresolved until this week.

In a statement, Katzenberg said his side was “satisfied with the outcome of this dispute and proud of the independent contributions of Quibi and its team of engineers to content presentation technology.” If only someone had actually used it.

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