The name "Qubo" was chosen because it had a "fun" sound, and the root word, "cube", was nearly crosslingual in both English and Spanish (cubo).

The move, however, drew criticism from the conservative watchdog group Parents Television Council, which filed a complaint against NBC.

A representative for NBC replied in a statement that the editing conformed to guidelines within the network's broadcast standards "not to advocate any one religious point of view".

VeggieTales creator Phil Vischer also expressed discontent with the edits, stating that he was not informed that religious content would be removed from the series, and that he would have refused to sign a contract with Qubo if he had known of the decision beforehand.

The network initially included a schedule of children's programming in rolling four-hour blocks; Ion intended to attempt carriage of the channel on pay-TV providers.

[11] In May 2009, Ion Media Networks filed an inquiry with the Federal Communications Commission to attempt must-carry subscription television carriage to expand Qubo's distribution to other providers.

[1] After March 1, Scripps began to utilize an outside-sourced three-hour block of programming on Ion Television Friday mornings in order to meet their E/I burden without any Qubo branding, including Finding Stuff Out and Science Max (both were past Qubo series), as well as Xploration Station programs from Steve Rotfeld Productions.

Qubo's oncoming sign-off went unacknowledged on-air outside occasional ticker announcements and the withdrawal of promotional advertising that no longer applied.

Qubo featured archived content from the programming libraries of NBCUniversal, Corus Entertainment, Scholastic Corporation, DreamWorks Animation, Classic Media, Trilogy Animation Group, WildBrain, Nelvana, 9 Story Media Group and Splash Entertainment, with its programs targeted all ages 5 to 14.

[20] After Classic Media was acquired by DreamWorks in 2012, the latter let the agreement with Qubo for the Filmation library lapse August 2013, and the block was restructured to feature a mixture of animated and live-action series sourced only from the remaining distribution partners.

As of November 2015[update], Qubo had current and pending affiliation agreements with 67 television stations encompassing 34 states and the District of Columbia.

[21] The network has an estimated national reach of 58.83% of all households in the United States (or 183,832,858 American families with at least one television set).

Qubo's programming was available by default via a national feed that was delivered directly to cable and satellite providers in markets without a local Ion Television station that carries the network.