Quibi Lawsuit Ends Like Quibi: Quickly

Quibi, the short-lived short-form subscription video-streaming service, had many problems in its, again, very, very short life. The biggest, as co-founder Jeff Katzenberg obliquely acknowledges—in the not-entirely-self-aware way that only billionaires can—in an interview with The New York Times’ Kara Swisher, is that no one asked for movies broken up into eight-minute chunks, and consequently no one wanted them, certainly not if they cost money, which they did.

Even if Katzenberg and fellow mastermind Meg Whitman had been able to overcome that teensy issue—and Katzenberg is candid enough to admit that, given, you know, everything, that may well have been impossible—a successful Quibi would still have faced another existential issue. Specifically, as Paul Singer was only too happy to point out and pay for others to point out, the technology upon which the Quibi platform was built kinda sorta maybe didn’t belong to Quibi.

But successful Quibi was not, and so a protracted legal drama over that technology—fun and full of revelations of Singer’s personal peccadillos it might be—was, like Quibi itself, not meant to be.

Eko, an interactive video company, and Quibi's successor QBI Holdings announced today that they’d reached a settlement in the legal battle over Quibi’s perspective-shifting Turnstyle feature, which Eko alleged the streaming service had swiped from its own proprietary video technology. Both companies have agreed to dismiss their legal action against one another, and Quibi will hand over both the video technology and Turnstyle IP to Eko as part of their agreement…. Quibi finally shut down in December, and Roku swooped in to snap up the IP remains from its corpse for its own streaming service, The Roku Channel. But it left behind the Turnstyle tech and its legal woes, which remained unresolved prior to this week.

Finally, some good news for Quibi [The Verge]
Jeffrey Katzenberg Talks About His Billion-Dollar Flop [NYT]

For more of the latest in litigation, regulation, deals and financial services trends, sign up for Finance Docket, a partnership between Breaking Media publications Above the Law and Dealbreaker.