Quibi has officially entered the online video streaming battle but its toughest competitors in the early goings are accusations of theft. The platform is involved in a legal battle about one of its marquee features, and an ugly social media fight over one of its shows. Worse yet for Quibi, both accusers have compelling cases.
The primary goal for the platform is to provide short-form, approximately 10-minute videos designed for mobile devices. That means, for the content itself, productions on Quibi need to be digestible in short bursts. Even episodic content would have to connect with a viewer quickly. At the same time, the technology itself needs to work well on mobile devices, and maybe even leverage some of the advantages smartphones and tablets have over TVs.
It's unfortunate then, that one of Quibi's bite-sized shows, along with the app's primary technological innovation may have been stolen from other creators. On one side, there's a lawsuit from media company Eko stating that it created Quibi's Turnstyle technology. On the other, a media outlet called Everything Is Terrible! is taking Quibi to task on Twitter for ripping off the artistic aesthetic and premise of some of its content. Quibi has denied both sets of accusations on multiple levels.
Eko's Fight with Quibi over Turnstyle
The Turnstyle feature is what allows Quibi to show full-screen videos in both portrait and landscape orientations on a phone. It's a bigger technological feat than it sounds like on the surface, and Eko says it invented it. Deadline reports that Eko's suit details a meeting between representatives of Eko and Quibi, in which a version of Turnstyle was demonstrated after a nondisclosure agreement. Quibi's founder, Jeffrey Katzenberg, acknowledges that the meeting occurred but says it wasn't of any significance. A few years later, after Quibi showed off its Turnstyle tech at the Consumer Electronics Show, Eko filed a complaint with the Apple App Store on the logic that, if Quibi is indeed guilty, hosting the app on the App Store violates Apple's terms.
Furthermore, Eko alleges that three employees from the company left and joined Snap, the company that owns Snapchat. It declares those employees were aware of Eko's Turnstyle tech and in possession of source code before two of the three joined Quibi. Eko says those two employees are credited with the creation of Quibi's Turnstyle. Meanwhile, Quibi says those employees did indeed come from Snap and Eko, but are not programmers and would not have had access to source code. Eko is pursuing an injunction against Quibi that, if granted, would force Quibi to stop using the tech, among other penalties.
Why Quibi's "Memory Hole" May Be a Rip-Off
Everything Is Terrible! specializes in found-footage editing: taking video from the 1980s and re-editing it while adding a voice over to create a different kind of entertainment. This is exactly the premise of one of Quibi's debut shows, Memory Hole. Found footage is a genre so it's not a unique concept, but Memory Hole specifically makes this scenario suspicious because Everything Is Terrible! also had a show by that name.
Beyond that, the marketing imagery for Quibi's Memory Hole bears more than a passing resemblance to a previous Everything Is Terrible! design. As the latter company told Gizmodo, "The fact that they made a 'new' show in the found footage genre, took the look of one of our projects, and combined it with the name of another one of ours tells me this isn’t just a coincidence." Additionally, there's evidence that the new show's creator had at least heard of the original show, as seen in an exchange on Instagram.
Quibi has released multiple statements in both cases denying any wrongdoing. Given the billions of dollars in funding it's received, and the countless partnerships formed around the app, it's hard to see either of these scenarios resulting in anything more than a large cash settlement. Still, both also carry enough evidence to cast Quibi as morally ambiguous.