Quibi and Eko are in a legal battle over video tech

Published March 10, 2020

Two video startups are making dueling legal claims against the other.

The Wall Street Journal broke the news yesterday that interactive video company Eko is accusing Quibi of infringing on its patented technology.

At around the same time, The Hollywood Reporter noted that Quibi (which is launching its short-form mobile video service next month) has filed a complaint in California federal court claiming that Eko has engaged in “a campaign of threats and harassment.”

At the heart of the dispute is Quibi’s Turnstyle technology, which allows viewers to seamlessly switch between landscape and portrait-mode viewing.

Both companies seem to agree that Eko CEO Yoni Bloch met with Jeffrey Katzenberg in March 2017 (before Katzenberg had even founded Quibi) about a possible investment in Eko, and that there was at least one follow-up meeting between Quibi and Eko employees in 2019.

Quibi will launch with 50 shows on April 6

Eko claims that it provided Quibi employees — both while they were working at Quibi and before then, when they were previously at Snap — with details and code behind its technology. Then, after Katzenberg and Quibi CEO Meg Whitman showed off Turnstyle at CES this year, Eko sent a letter to Quibi claiming that the feature infringed on its intellectual property. (According to the Journal’s story, Eko’s lawyers have sent a letter to Quibi but have not filed a lawsuit.)

“Our Turnstyle technology was developed internally at Quibi by our talented engineers and we have, in fact, received a patent for it,” Quibi said in a statement. “These claims have absolutely no merit and we will vigorously defend ourselves against them in court.”

Meanwhile, in a statement, Eko described Quibi’s technology as “a near-identical copy of its own,” and said the company’s legal motion is “nothing more than a PR stunt”:

It is telling that Quibi filed the motion only after learning the Wall Street Journal was going to publish an article exposing allegations of Quibi’s theft of Eko’s technology … Eko will take the legal actions necessary to defend its intellectual property and looks forward to demonstrating its patent rights to the court.

You can read Quibi’s full complaint below.

Quibi complaint by TechCrunch on Scribd

BuzzFeed teams up with Eko to create interactive recipes and other videos

Published April 2, 2019

BuzzFeed and Eko have been working together to create a wide range of interactive videos, which they began launching in the past week or so — starting with this Tasty potato recipe that allows you to customize your ingredients, revealing a bit about your personality in the process.

There’s also an interactive Tarot reading, a video quiz that determines which kind of dog you are and this customizable ramen video.

I spoke with BuzzFeed and Eko executives last week to learn more about how they’re working together, and where it might go next.

These videos — usually brief and based on existing BuzzFeed formats — feel pretty different from previous Eko showcases like “That Moment When,” which is more of a comedic, Choose Your Own Adventure-style story.

Eko’s Chief Creative Officer Alon Benari acknowledged that in the past, the company usually “started from a traditional video and injected interactivity into it.” But while “this is one of the first projects where we did the other path” — namely, taking an interactive format like a quiz and introducing video — the focus is still on “bringing together the best of both worlds.”

“This isn’t a direction change,” added Vice President of Business Development Ivy Sheibar. “We have a full pipeline of what you would consider coming more from traditional video.”

Walmart is working with Eko to create interactive content

As for BuzzFeed, Chief Marketing Officer Ben Kaufman suggested that this is a natural extension of the publisher’s strategy to experiment with new formats. By offering this kind of interactivity, BuzzFeed can tailor videos to their viewers’ needs and interests (for example, by customizing video recipes based on dietary restrictions) while also “allowing our audience to engage with our videos and create data feedback loops.”

In addition to providing the technical platform to create these videos, Kaufman said Eko’s team shared important insights from years of experience with interactivity.

“One of the things they trained us on was what the meaning of a meaningful choice was — [a choice] where actually as an audience member you would take that to heart and makes you feel like, ‘This video is really made for me,’ ” he said.

Kaufman added that as BuzzFeed and Eko continue rolling out different types of interactive videos, “Our goal in the next few weeks is to crack this, to build a real deep audience connection, see what they are loving and go heavy into scaling that.”