Video Interview: PBS’s Lesli Rotenberg

NEW YORK: Lesli Rotenberg, the senior VP of children’s media at PBS, discusses the importance of connecting today’s youth with age-appropriate and developmentally appropriate media content, highlighting new innovations coming down the pipeline.

At the start of the year, U.S. President Barack Obama put out a call in his State of the Union address for Americans to "out-educate" and "out-innovate." PBS Kids has responded to this by leading the charge in providing educational children’s media across all platforms. The channel features a wealth of programming focused on math, science and engineering skills on air, and PBS Kids has complemented these efforts with a slew of digital initiatives.

PBSKids.org continues to generate record-breaking usage levels month after month. The site works to engage children with learning-focused games, along with providing a host of free educational videos and a number of original web-based series. Among the most recent are Noah Comprende and Chuck Vanderchuck, which focus on Spanish and music, respectively.

PBS Kids has launched a number of mobile apps as well, including the Martha Speaks Dog Party app, which was shown in a recent report from the U.S. Department of Education to have increased literacy skills up to 31 percent among kids 3 to 7. Transmedia is another area that’s become an important facet of PBS Kids’ initiatives, in particular with augmented reality and in-video gaming.