Didn’t expect to be talking about Quibi so soon here again, but when it seems those of us who were upset that there is no cast to TV option now have a definitive answer on the subject.
Meg Whitman was interviewed on CNBC and said it was always a planned feature to cast to TV, just not at launch. She also admitted that had they known about COVID-19 they would have launched with this feature.
Regardless of COVID-19 situation, I find it strange that this major feature wasn’t planned for the launch, but I guess that goes back to their hubris that it wasn’t a major feature. Um, yes it is!
She added that they’re working with the Quibi engineering team to accelerate the process of the cast to TV functionality. Will it arrive within the free 90 day trial period? Don’t know, but maybe when that feature launches they’ll give new subscribers — or returning subscribers — another free lunch.
Quibi is being sued for infringement by Eko for another phone-based feature: when you turn the phone it identifies the orientation (landscape or portrait) and reformats the video playing automatically.
Need to modify something else in my original post (see: Quibi is the Cats of streaming services)
When I outlined my frustration using Quibi, the Google Play store was showing “100,000+ downloads”, but that is just one download platform. According to Meg Whitman, they actually had 1.7 million downloads across all platforms in the first week.
New mobile streaming service Quibi saw 1.7 million downloads in its first week, CEO Meg Whitman said on CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” Monday.
Meg Whitman says Quibi reached 1.7 million downloads in first week
Will update my earlier post comment that I was surprised they couldn’t amass at least 1 million downloads.
Meg Whitman seemed very pleased with the first week release download numbers, citing it as “the most successful launch.” It doesn’t sound like they expected even this many downloads. She also spoke about their elation over how much the service was used the first week. They expected people would watch it more sporadically, but instead they are watching it for longer periods of time.
(gets back to my point that people don’t want to watch movies or TV in pre-selected 6-10 minute chunks, they want to use the pause/resume functionality that’s been around since, well, forever)
I’ll revisit Quibi when their cast to TV function is implemented.
Movies, Movies, Movies 
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