TVKIDS
The fifth edition of the virtual TV Kids Festival, available to view on demand here, hit on many of the game-changing developments reshaping the children’s media sector on the heels of what was a difficult year, to put it mildly. The overarching message remains that it’s rough out there amid an untenable sea of available content and a challenged funding ecosystem, and the only way to get through this turbulence is to be creative—and not be afraid to throw out the rulebook when needed.
In her brilliant presentation, Olivia Deane, research manager at Ampere Analysis, gave TV Kids Festival viewers valuable data on commissioning trends and provided insights for traversing today’s “volatile” market. Deane articulated how we got here, outlining the boom in connected TV usage and the proliferation of SVOD platforms that delivered a surge in content production for young ones. “In the third quarter of 2024, there were over 461,000 hours of children’s content available to watch on streaming platforms or scheduled TV,” Deane said. “This data doesn’t account for the amount of children’s content also available on free-to-watch platforms or social media.”
So, how does one break through that? Known IP very much helps, accounting for 30 percent of kids’ commissions in the first half of 2024, Deane said. We spotlighted the frenetic book-optioning sector in our panel with Dandelooo’s Emmanuèle Pétry, ZDF Studios’ Oliver Grundel, Hidden Pigeon Company’s Kristofer Updike and Lion Forge Entertainment’s Jeremy Colfer. “When you bring a book to broadcasters, they know immediately what you’re talking about,” Pétry said. “You can gain two or three years because you go straight into development. Timing-wise, it’s valuable.”
While producers are mainly looking to books and comics for adaptations, the gaming sector is one that many are exploring, as we found from our Game Time session moderated by Dubit’s David Kleeman and featuring insights from Wind Sun Sky Entertainment’s Catherine Winder and DeAPlaneta Entertainment’s Jimena Tormo. “Gaming is massive for kids right now,” Kleeman said. “Per Dubit’s most recent trends survey, only sleep and watching videos get a bigger share of young people’s time. The difference between videos and games is almost inconsequential. Time spent on digital activities only grows with age. And it’s not just a U.S. phenomenon. We survey seven countries, and in virtually all of them, between a fifth and a quarter of kids’ time is spent on digital activities—gaming, video and so forth. Once, linear led the way, and games were an ancillary way to engage. Now, a lot of IPs launch game-first, and there are a lot of models for show-to-game and game-to-show. Most children’s media companies see themselves as multiplatform franchise builders. They’re all working to ensure their content is aligned with young people and how they watch, engage and play.”
“Engagement”—what it means, how to measure it, and, of course, how to get it—was the focus of an insightful session moderated by children’s media expert Emily Horgan with pocket.watch’s Beck Canote and Kedoo Entertainment’s Olivier Bernard. Presenting some of her data on Netflix engagement, Horgan said that among the kids’ shows on that platform, “YouTube IP preschool dominates, and YouTube IP within preschool has a really strong footprint. We’re here to talk about how these different platforms, touchpoints and data points can all swirl together.”
Horgan’s analysis also found strong demand for dialogue-free comedy on Netflix, including Booba from Kedoo Entertainment, which has built a thriving business distributing content to digital platforms. Pocket.watch, meanwhile, has assembled a powerhouse stable of YouTube creators and has been bringing that content to the broader marketplace.
Creator economy content is making its way to “traditional” platforms, as we heard in our signature session with leading buyers—this time with ITV’s Darren Nartey, Nickelodeon’s Lynsey O’Callaghan and Amazon Kids+’s Monica Sharma.
For ITV, acquisitions are “an incredibly important part of our business strategy,” Nartey said, accounting for about 80 percent of its kids’ output. ITV shuttered CITV in 2023 and, as a result, “needed to quickly up the number of hours on our new AVOD platform, ITVX, and ITVX Kids. Acquisitions were a great way for us to step up in terms of the different genres we could offer kids in the U.K.”
Amazon Kids+ offers episodic content and films as well as games, books, podcasts, music and Alexa skills, Sharma explained. “Across all of these content types, most of our content is acquired.”
Similarly, at Nick, “acquisitions are hugely important to us, across our whole international footprint,” O’Callaghan noted. “They allow us to deliver brilliant titles alongside our beloved brands. They also allow us to diversify our points of view [and] deliver on business obligations with our affiliates in various territories. We would be lost without acquisitions.”
Meeting the diverse needs of buyers, adapting to the new normal, emphasizing franchise creation and coming up with innovative funding models were headline themes out of our C-suite keynotes with executives leading multiplatform children’s media companies.
Josh Silverman, executive VP and chief franchise officer at Mattel, talked about what is driving the toy giant’s IP content strategy as it marks its 80th birthday. “At the end of the day, we want to extend our fans’ emotional connection to our products, stories and experiences in an authentic way,” Silverman said in his session.
Vince Commisso, president and CEO of 9 Story Media Group, discussed the company’s union with Scholastic, noting, “We see this broadly as a marriage between IP and capabilities. Scholastic Entertainment has great literary-based IP and development capabilities to turn that IP into TV and feature film content. 9 Story has tremendous capabilities in production and development, which are now combined under Scholastic Entertainment, and merchandising and licensing that we can bring to bear on that IP that will allow us to control the IP more directly within the Scholastic family.”
Dominique Neudecker, VP of kids and family for TOGGO at Germany’s Super RTL and this winter’s TV Kids Pioneer Award recipient, shared with TV Kids Festival viewers the need to reach young ones on whatever platforms they’re using. “Next to linear TV, we invested heavily in building a proper kids’ web business to distribute our content via our digital platforms, apps and the major third-party digital platforms. We launched a radio channel for kids and families. We travel through various German cities with our TOGGO Tour. We have a footprint in the retail business through our strong consumer-product business. Our motto is: Wherever the kids go, we are there with the TOGGO brand, being the number one go-to destination.”
In his keynote session, Jon Rutherford, president of global rights, franchise and content strategy at Boat Rocker Studios, highlighted how that company’s diverse slate has helped it manage the challenges of the market and stressed the importance of having a 360-degree approach. “Franchise to us is all pieces working together to create something that will thrive in a marketplace more than just the individual pieces on their own,” he said.
Boat Rocker’s Canadian roots have also helped it weather the challenges of today. We looked at what is transpiring in that prolific sector in our keynote with Shaw Rocket Fund’s Agnes Augustin. “Canadian producers have always been innovative in finding partners globally,” she said. “It’s still very challenging, but we’re positioned well to build on those global partnerships to help create content.”
Producers across the globe are looking at new techniques to lower the cost of production and give creators the tools they need. We highlighted some of those tools in our session on animation innovation with Composition Media’s Carl Reed and Cheeky Little Media’s Patrick Egerton, who weighed in on Unreal Engine and AI. “We have three principles that we follow for integrating any tool, especially AI,” Reed said. “They need to be accelerated, adaptable and artist-driven. Accelerated—if it’s not making us faster, why not just do it the old-fashioned way. Adaptable—we have to be at the control. If we can’t do what our storyboard or animatic is telling us that we have approved, then we can’t use it. Artist-driven—we need to have these tools in the hands of our artists to not start from scratch. That’s how we decide which tools we use. It’s speeding things up remarkably and affecting what an independent studio can do from a cost/time perspective.”
The TV Kids Festival closed with a creative keynote with Zachariah OHora, the writer and illustrator behind PBS KIDS’ Carl the Collector. The series is PBS KIDS’ first production centered on a neurodiverse character. On deciding on the animation style, look, tone and feel, OHora noted, “I didn’t know anything about animation. I’ve been doing books for 15 years, so my style is very left to right. I think of it cinematically, but it has strong black lines and patterns. Laying things over and having things move over those bold lines presents its own issues. Yowza! Animation wanted to make it look like my books came to life, and they did an amazing job.”
