DHX Media’s Steven DeNure

Steven DeNure, the president and COO of DHX Media, talks to TV Kids about the latest activities across its four main divisions: DHX Studios, DHX Distribution, DHX Television and DHX Brands.

Celebrating its tenth birthday this month, DHX Media has spent the last decade cultivating its businesses to become a key international player in the production, distribution, broadcast and licensing of children’s and family entertainment. Along the way, it has acquired a number of companies and libraries, amassing a catalogue of more than 11,500 half-hours of content, including the globally recognized brand Teletubbies, which it recently remade with state-of-the-art special effects.

TV KIDS: What does it mean to you to be celebrating the tenth anniversary of this company, and what’s driving its current gains?
DENURE: Of course we’re immensely proud of what the team at DHX Media has achieved over the last ten years, growing one of the world’s biggest content libraries with globally recognizable brands, establishing four production studios, adding broadcast to build a vertically integrated company and employing some of the smartest, most talented people in the business…but we’re not finished yet!

The kids’ industry is entering a very exciting phase, with fantastic opportunities for leveraging our business and our brands. We are at the start of a global journey for properties such as Teletubbies, Twirlywoos and Make It Pop, and our library has standout content that is proving to be the first port of call for emerging players in the SVOD and AVOD space. We have grown our production capabilities with 2D and 3D animation as well as live action.

We recently unveiled our online multiplatform kids’ network, WildBrain, propelling it from incubation to the next stage of growth, offering DHX-library and third-party-owned videos for kids from 2 to 10 years old.

TV KIDS: How did the idea come about to bring back Teletubbies?
DENURE: A few years ago, a number of important preschool properties came into our library with our acquisition of the assets of Ragdoll Worldwide. Ragdoll is a great company that not only created Teletubbies but also other well-known shows, including In the Night Garden. DHX has made many acquisitions over the years, and what we’ve been looking for overall are libraries that fit into the library we’ve been building and properties that we think are meaningful in the long run and, on top of that, properties that we could look at revitalizing. In the case of Ragdoll, all of those boxes were checked, and, in particular, that last one. We believed at the time that Teletubbies would be right for a relaunch.

The old Teletubbies episodesare still on the air in many places, but they’d all been produced pre-HD. From our point of view, there was an opportunity to update them. There is still massive viewership on YouTube for Teletubbies, and we thought that was a really good proxy for recognition and popularity. When [shows] aren’t on television and you’re not getting ratings, how else do you know whether they’re important to parents or kids? To us, that was an important piece of our due diligence.

TV KIDS: How did Darrall Macqueen come on board as producers?
DENURE: First of all, they are among the best producers of preschool programs. We had the privilege of working with them on Topsy and Tim and understood their talent and the rigor with which they approach things. In terms of the team here, it was initially Josh Scherba, who runs DHX Distribution, who suggested we talk to Billy [Macqueen] and Maddy [Darrall] at Darrall Macqueen.

When we went to them and said that we were thinking about doing a new series with the Teletubbies, they said, You can’t do that! The Teletubbies are perfect the way they are!

We started a really interesting dialogue about, first of all, why would you relaunch Teletubbies. That made us think hard and deep about “why” and if so, then what it would look like. We had tried to uprez some of the old episodes, but we realized that taking existing standard-definition television and uprezzing it is not the same as producing a beautiful new 4K show.

They dug in creatively and became interested in and inspired by what we would do next with the Teletubbies given the technology available to us. Darrall Macqueen did a great job of saying, Let’s embrace the current technology, using miniature sets and green screen. It’s the [same] technology that’s been developed for big films like Harry Potter and Lord of the Rings to combine fantastic miniature sets and massive costumed characters, the big and small together, to create a magical world. We are thrilled with the way the show looks. We think that it plays extremely well. It’s a fantastic update and tribute to what was a great and groundbreaking show the first time around. In some ways, for preschool it’s broken new ground again.

TV KIDS: What led to the recent realignment and rebranding at DHX Studios?
DENURE: DHX is a highly dynamic environment and we’re always changing, reorganizing, acquiring things here and there and rethinking the company. In some ways, that’s consistent with the massive change that’s going on within the filmed-entertainment business anyway. For us, this was a way of gathering up all of our creative assets, at least in terms of development and production, putting them under one roof, and with the acquisition of Nerd Corps Entertainment last year, putting Ace Fipke and Ken Faier at the helm.

TV KIDS: What does DHX Studios have coming down the pike in animation, live-action and interactive content?
DENURE: There are some great animated projects in the works right now such as Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs: The Series, which we partnered with Sony on; Supernoobs, a new series from Scott Fellows that recently came out; and ongoing we have Inspector Gadget, which we’re continuing production on. We are working with great partners, including Hasbro. We are doing some work with DreamWorks and, more recently, we announced an extension of our partnership with Mattel.

In terms of the balance between live action and animation, it changes from year to year. We don’t come into it with a prescription about how much of either we should be doing. Having said that, we have been very busy over the past year on the live-action side in our own studios with series like the Netflix original Degrassi: Next Class and the Nickelodeon hit Make It Pop, which was created by Tom Lynch. We’re in continuing production in the U.K. with Darrall Macqueen, and are just finishing up with the Hank Zipzer series that we produce with Kindle Entertainment and Walker Productions. We’ve completed principal photography on Airmageddon from producer Steve Carsey, who is the creator of Robot Wars. CBBC is our partner.

There has been a wide variety of content that we’ve created on the interactive side. We have studios in Vancouver and Halifax that continue to create content around projects like Slugterra and Inspector Gadget. There is an ongoing stream of things that are created for projects like Degrassi that link into the social media side.

TV KIDS: How are you balancing the growth of the DHX Distribution catalogue against being able to nurture individual IP?
DENURE: The catalogue has grown both organically, with shows that we make, and through the acquisition of libraries. For us, the number of original shows that we’re adding to the catalogue every year is somewhere between 8 and 12 series. What we’ve tried to do is manage those additions in such a way that they don’t overlap; we don’t want to compete with ourselves when it comes to new offerings in the marketplace.

TV KIDS: How has the DHX Television bouquet been performing since the Family rebranding?
DENURE: It’s still really early days. The relaunch was in January. So we’re watching the numbers carefully. There have been some good wins and we’ve got some great shows on the channels.

At Family Channel, we’ve been trying to age the audience up in the evening after 9 p.m. We have programmed Degrassi: Next Class later in the evening; that is a well-known and well-loved show in Canada and we’re seeing pretty good numbers on that.

For us, it’s a matter of paying attention and being nimble with our programming strategy. There are a lot of changes coming all at once, particularly in the Canadian market. We’re not only going to slightly older age cohorts in later prime-time hours but there’s also a changing environment here with pick-and-pay [partial unbundling of cable packages] being implemented later this year. The whole industry is standing by to see how things unfold.

TV KIDS: What are some of the latest initiatives from DHX Brands?
DENURE: DHX Brands is focused on a small portfolio of properties. Teletubbies is at the top of the list. In the Night Garden has been doing very well for us. We have a key new project that we’ve been working on with Anne Wood and Ragdoll called Twirlywoos. Older-skewing properties include Make It Pop, which has some interesting brand opportunities. There are [extensions] for Slugterra and Caillou, which is a perennial favorite. The focus right now is on the rollout of Teletubbies internationally and Twirlywoos as a key priority.

TV KIDS: What are the benefits that come with having the size and scale that DHX has achieved?
DENURE: We have worked a long time to get this level of scale. DHX will be ten years old this year and Decode Entertainment, which I co-founded, would have been 20. We’ve been on this track for many, many years and have believed that having scale and size does matter.

It’s important to make sure that we have all parts of the organization working together and that we think very carefully about other things that we add, whether it’s production capacity, individual titles or additional libraries. The key [idea] for us is to be able to play across a number of different parts of the business and to make those parts all work together.

TV KIDS: What are the key initiatives you’ll be spending time on over the next year for DHX’s business as a whole?
DENURE: One of the priorities is our expansion into Asia, particularly China. We have spent a lot of time on that and have a big agenda there. Teletubbies was actually the first Western preschool show to air on CCTV in China.

We also want to expand our consumer-products business. A real priority for me is to try to make sure we have all parts of the company working together where it makes sense. We’ve got great, smart people in each one of our businesses: Peter Byrne, who’s responsible for DHX Brands; Josh Scherba, with whom I have been working for around 14 years; and likewise at DHX Television and DHX Studios. We have a very experienced, smart management team here; it’s one thing to build an integrated platform, but our focus is on making all of these parts work in concert.