TVKIDS
Olivia Deane, research manager at Ampere Analysis, gave TV Kids Festival viewers valuable data on commissioning trends and provided insights for traversing the “volatile” market today.
Deane presented Ampere’s research exploring the kids’ content market in the era beyond peak TV, in a session that you can view on-demand here.
The broadband boom beginning in 2015 “opened the floodgates for the growth of OTT and a new era of global mass media on-demand,” Deane explained. “As a result, the media market enjoyed exponential growth due to streamers, and content spending reached an all-time high. However, this boom couldn’t last forever, and the more recent oversaturation of both consumers and content means that we’re reaching the end of what we’ve been calling peak TV.”
Deane showed Ampere data on connected-TV device gains between 2016 and 2024, noting those were driven by households with children. “A much higher proportion of consumers who live with children own more than one TV-connected device than those without. Adults no longer have a monopoly on the single TV screen. That means that their children can watch what they want to watch. But the children are also being entertained, which means that the adults can actually enjoy the content they want to watch. This increase in demand saw streamers under new pressure to build a catalog that will appease this new youngest consumer group. As a result, more children and family titles were acquired by streamers than any other scripted genre in 2021. The big studios were the ones to benefit from this, so we had Disney, Warner, Paramount and Sony producing most of the acquired children’s content available to stream in 2021. This rapid growth in acquisitions from what is a relatively new business line means that we saw a large amount of money being funneled straight back into children’s commissioning.”
The volume of children’s commissions announced increased by a whopping 53 percent between 2020 and 2022, Deane said, which was a boon for producers but led to a glut of content on the market. “In the third quarter of 2024, there were over 461,000 hours of children’s content available to watch on streaming platforms or on scheduled TV. Not accounting for sleep, it would take you 52 years to watch all of the children’s content that was available in the third quarter of 2024. This data doesn’t account for the amount of children’s content that’s also available on free-to-watch platforms or social media.”
Compounding the saturation problem is the slowdown in SVOD take-up; “net adds are still far below what they were in 2019 and 2020,” Deane said. “The drop in subscriber growth has had a knock-on effect on the media market as a whole. SVOD companies accounted for most of the growth in the media market between 2015 and 2024. Ultimately, this massive content boom we’ve seen over the past ten years was due to streamers, and that has come to an end.”
All commissions were down in 2024, Deane said, adding that in children’s and family in particular, “despite suffering a slowdown in the first part of the year, increased activity in the second half of the year saw children’s and family commissions maintain a consistent volume across 2024 compared with the previous year. This was in stark contrast with decreases seen across more expensive scripted genres like romance, sci-fi and fantasy, and crime and thriller. So, it seems like it’s quite good news for children’s content, especially given the trends we were seeing at the start of 2024.”
There is a disclaimer to that, Deane added. “When we look at 2023 and 2024 children’s commissions by region, we can start to see that the data is being heavily skewed by increased activity in the Asia-Pacific market, where children’s and family titles increased by almost a quarter over the period. The decreases across Western Europe and North America are certainly more in line with the struggles being faced by creators in English-speaking markets.”
Deane then looked specifically at the drastic fall in VOD kids’ commissions, which dropped by 30 percent between 2023 and 2024. “With streaming growth slowing, VOD commissioners are having to be more selective about their spending on original content, and data can help them understand better what motivates people to subscribe. Only 15 percent of all SVOD consumers in Q3 2024 reported signing up for a service because it had content their children liked to watch.”
The trend is even more pronounced in Western markets, “where streaming growth is the most stagnant,” Deane explained. “SVOD kids’ commissions in Western Europe and North America declined by almost half between 2023 and 2024.”
Meanwhile, public broadcasters continue to support children’s media, with Deane calling them “the jewel in the crown” of the sector, especially in Western Europe and North America. “Between the first half of 2023 and 2024, not only did public broadcasters announce the highest volume of children’s commissions, but they were also one of only three commissioner types to show growth in the volume of children’s commissions announced.”
The children’s television market is in “general decline,” Deane said, driven by the streamer pullback, but there are areas of growth, she explained. Among them, Deane highlighted the still significant role of kids fare on SVOD services, leading them to expand their acquired slates. “Children and family was the second most-viewed type of content on Netflix in the first half of 2024,” Deane said. “We established earlier that children are not a major motivating factor for consumers when deciding to subscribe to a service. However, they still play an important role in subscriber behavior. Households with children are not only more likely to have more viewing devices, but they also make up a large proportion of Netflix viewing activity. While children’s content isn’t enticing people to sign up, it is stopping them from leaving. Across the board, households with children were less likely to churn. While streamers are limiting their budget for new, original and exclusive children’s content, they are also acquiring large volumes of existing children’s content to appease this important consumer group. While Amazon, Netflix and Disney all commissioned a much lower volume of children’s content, the number of acquired children’s titles on their platforms all grew.”
Deane continued, “Not unlike the early days of streaming, where acquisition was a focus over commissioning, the big studio names are at the forefront of content sales. This is where we will start to see revenue flowing back into the marketplace for children’s content. Most of the content is still sourced from independent producers.”
Of course, you need completed shows to sell, and securing a commission these days is a challenge. Deane highlighted some emerging models she believes could be useful to producers going forward, including the case of Wakfu from Ankama Animation. Based on a video game, the series premiered in 2008 and was canceled two years later, but following a sale to Netflix in 2014, Ankama established a Kickstarter, first to raise funds for an English dub and then later to finance a fourth season. “If we skip ahead four years, the fourth season is finally released. The title at this point has reached 52 different markets and is now available on Prime Video as well as Netflix. There’s no need for the company to launch a Kickstarter. They have enough funds to announce the production of season five in the second quarter of 2024. This title is an excellent example of how creators don’t necessarily need to reinvent the wheel to find success in post-peak TV, but they could instead look to their back catalog to leverage previously popular titles that were perhaps overlooked at a time when the focus was largely on new, original content.”
Titles based on existing IPs continue to generate interest, accounting for 30 percent of kids’ commissions in the first half of 2024. However, Deane noted, “Titles based on the most popular video games were practically non-existent, especially if you consider the sheer volume of titles on YouTube that are related to these things that are currently available to stream. It’s really clear that commissioners aren’t making the most of powerful IP and, in particular, IP that children are engaging with elsewhere. Not only do IP-based commissions satisfy consumers’ desire to see their favorite stories imagined on screen, but they also provide a way for commissioners to safeguard their spending by investing in ideas that have already proved popular.”
