Update, April 23, 2020 (2:15AM ET): Quibi founder Jeffrey Katzenberg has told Reuters that support for casting the service from mobile apps to big screen TVs is coming in May.
Katzenberg also told the newswire that Quibi has been downloaded more than 2.7 million times since its launch earlier this month. The founder said the figure was “encouraging” for a new brand and in the specter of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Quibi executive said he expects adoption to speed up once stay-at-home orders are lifted, as the service was designed for on-the-go viewing.
Original article, April 6, 2020 (3:46PM ET): Quibi is the latest premium streaming service that wants your eyeballs to watch its content. It’s now available in the U.S., Canada, and other countries with over 50 scripted, unscripted and daily shows. One of the big bullet points about the service is that it’s only available on mobile devices. Specifically, the only Quibi apps you can get are for Android and iOS. However, many people have been asking, “Can I watch Quibi on my TV?”
It’s a question that’s very understandable to ask. After all, many people watch streaming services in their living room or bedroom on their smart TVs, in addition to their smartphones and tablets. However, the people behind Quibi are focusing solely on the mobile market, although executives have said they could consider other options if the audience demands it.
Having said that, is there any way to watch Quibi on TV?
Check it out: Here’s our full Quibi review
Can Quibi shows be streamed on TVs?
As we said, the official answer is “No”. There are no dedicated Quibi apps for smart TVs, nor are there any apps for the many streaming sticks and set-top boxes that support platforms like Roku, Amazon Fire TV, or Android TV. The app also doesn’t support Chromecast or, in the iOS app’s case, TVs that support Airplay.
We did try a couple of theoretical workarounds. We discovered that you can run Quibi on Chromebooks that support running Android apps from the Google Play Store. The video only runs on the app’s portrait mode, however. We decided to connect a Chromebook with Quibi installed on a big screen TV with an HDMI cable. As you can see, we got the app to show up on the TV with this method.
The bad news, however, is that when we actually tried to run Quibi videos, we got a black screen with no audio. We tried this method on a few different Chromebooks, but with the same result. So that method is out.
Another method we tried was to use the Google Home app’s Cast My Screen feature. Again, it showed the Quibi app on the TV, but once we started playing videos we got a message staying “Sorry, screen mirroring is disabled.”
It’s possible other third party screen mirroring apps might be successful, but we have yet to try those out. It’s also possible that you could record Quibi videos on your smartphone screen and then show them on your TV later, but again we have yet to try these methods out. If we discover a working method to watch Quibi on your TV, we will update this article.
In conclusion, there’s not an official way to watch Quibi content on your big screen TV, and there’s no known workaround either. Hopefully, the folks at Quibi will make native smart TV apps for the service in the near future. Would you like to watch Quibi on your big screen television?
