{"id":25190,"date":"2023-05-26T08:50:19","date_gmt":"2023-05-26T12:50:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dev2.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/worldscreen.com\/"},"modified":"2023-05-30T09:00:48","modified_gmt":"2023-05-30T13:00:48","slug":"rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/","title":{"rendered":"ROKiT Flix\u2019s Jonathan Kendrick"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Earlier this month, the free kids\u2019 streaming service ROKiT Flix became available to anyone with a mobile device. The new platform provides kids with 2D animation, stop-motion comics and various AI features\u2014all with no advertisements. At launch, its lineup included animated stories from the Bible, shows such as\u00a0<em>Oh No, Nolan!<\/em>\u00a0and much more. Co-founder and chairman Jonathan Kendrick speaks to\u00a0<em>TV Kids Weekly<\/em>\u00a0about the inspiration for the new service, how it utilizes AI, its various unique features and more.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignright\" src=\"https:\/\/newsletters.worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/img\/2023-05-25-JonathanKendrick-0523.jpg\" alt=\"***Image***\" width=\"191\" height=\"226\" \/><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0What inspired the launch of ROKiT Flix?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0It came about in many aspects by accident. I was in a hotel room, and, as everybody who has been in a hotel room knows, you open the drawer, and there\u2019s a Bible there. I\u2019m quite a scriptural person. I\u2019ve asked a lot of hotel managers, Does anybody ever bother with that? They say, No, nobody picks up the Bible. I got to thinking, wouldn\u2019t it be great if you could get the Bible into the hands of young kids? This crusty old book that nobody\u2014particularly Gen Z\u2014reads anymore. So I thought, we\u2019ll animate the whole Bible in a very short form, so every story is no longer than four minutes because of their attention span. We\u2019ve animated the whole of the Old Testament now. Once I\u2019d done that, I thought maybe I could talk to hotel chains and instead of putting a [physical] Bible in the drawer, on the hotel channel, you could have the Bible.<\/p>\n<p>That\u2019s what I did. I made six hours of animation, three feature-length films. It cost a lot of money, as you can imagine; three feature-length animations is not cheap. It\u2019s not Pixar stuff, but it\u2019s animated. And I thought, uh-oh, I\u2019ve done it again. I\u2019ve built this thing, but how am I going to get it out there now? Because I\u2019ve got this incredible team in India who did this for me, I said, why don\u2019t we create our own streaming channel? And not just do Biblical stuff, let\u2019s do everything. Entertainment, education. Focus mainly on family and kids\u2019 stuff. That\u2019s how it came about.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0Tell me about how AI has been utilized for ROKiT Flix\u2019s programming and overall development.<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0With AI, the genie\u2019s out of the bottle, and you can\u2019t stop it. People are going, Oh dear, oh dear, but maybe we should\u2019ve thought about that before we released it. You either embrace a new technology or you don\u2019t. We did. Although AI is fantastic, it is very limited because at the moment, there is no real continuity. It can\u2019t do full videos. We\u2019ve embraced AI as much as we can. We created a separate team, mainly in India but also in Mexico, that can do AI stories. And we\u2019ve created a whole development of AI, mainly for education. We call them the ROKiT Storybooks. We\u2019ve done the whole Bible again. It\u2019s not full animation; it\u2019s stop-motion animation. We\u2019re doing Shakespeare, [Charles] Dickens, the works of all the Greek philosophers and Arthur Conan Doyle\u2019s Sherlock Holmes. We\u2019re trying to bring these stories alive, some great literary works that kids just aren\u2019t reading.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0Speaking of the ROKiT Storybook collection, how are these stories chosen for adaptation?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0We sit around and think, What would be interesting for children and youngsters to have a new fresh version, rather than looking on a page? We just pick them ourselves. We\u2019re not following any curriculum, although we have been approached by a lot of academics and educational people asking, Can we use this in our education? For example, we\u2019re doing the history of the world. There are some great books out there, like three inches thick. We\u2019re animating the whole of the history of the world. The one issue we\u2019re worried about, if I\u2019m honest, I\u2019m insisting that we make it historically perfect. That is a big thing. We do curate these. We have a whole team saying, Is that right? We don\u2019t want to offend anybody, and we don\u2019t want to make a mistake where we\u2019ve said something that isn\u2019t true. And AI can do that if you\u2019re not careful. It\u2019ll make a statement that looks like it\u2019s absolutely spot on, but it\u2019s not quite true.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0One especially unique feature of the service is ROKiT Animation All Stars, which allows children to make their own content through AI. What drove the decision to include this feature? How does it work?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:\u00a0<\/strong>Talking to a lot of people I know, a lot of kids are animating a lot of stuff in their bedrooms and their garages that will never see the light of day. Some of them are really, really talented. This was before AI. And they\u2019ve got great ideas for a program, a movie or a series, but they have no way of getting them out there. So, ROKiT Animation All Stars is a little bit like\u00a0<em>Pop Idol<\/em>. Bring us your stuff, confidentially, nobody will know if you get refused. If we like it, we\u2019ll animate it and we\u2019ll create a series for you. It\u2019s basically\u00a0<em>Pop Idol<\/em>\u00a0for animation, for kids who want to get their stuff out there.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0How much content do you plan to produce yourselves versus through the use of AI?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0For the Bible, we do both. We do it in real animation and in AI. The Bible in real animation is like a TV series. The whole thing is animated. The AI [version] is more [like] our storybooks. It\u2019s more [like] pictures with stories. But AI will get better. To answer your question, we produce an awful lot. We have 200 people in India producing our content in the traditional sense. We\u2019ve just increased that by 20 percent to take care of AI. So, we do both. I think 80 percent is our own stuff, 20 percent is now AI. That will probably go up to 30-35 percent, but we don\u2019t really want to do any more than that. We want to keep our creative juices and our creative people separate. But we\u2019ve got hundreds and hundreds of hours of our content.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0Are third-party acquisitions part of the mix?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0We\u2019ve done some very major deals with anime studios in Japan, where a lot of their stuff is in Japanese. We\u2019re dubbing it, taking the license for it and converting it into English. Believe it or not, they\u2019re buying it back off of us when it\u2019s converted into English because we do such a good job.<\/p>\n<p><strong>TV KIDS:<\/strong>\u00a0Is there anything else you would like to share with our readers?<br \/>\n<strong>KENDRICK:<\/strong>\u00a0I\u2019m very nervous and worried about social media. We didn\u2019t have it when I was a young man, and you couldn\u2019t be bullied or [preyed upon]. What we wanted to do with ROKiT Flix: not only is it free and there are no ads, but it is completely family-oriented. We know\u2014because we\u2019re all parents\u2014you can put your children in front of ROKiT Flix, and they\u2019re not going to see anything horrible, nasty, vicious, anything other than pure family stuff. What I wanted to do was create a safe haven for children. You can never stop naughty people from doing what they want to do, but unlike WhatsApp, where you just need a telephone number to get onto it, and you never know who your children are talking to on TikTok, ROKiT Flix has a more stringent application. We want to know a lot more about you, verify your email, know where you live. Although it won\u2019t stop predators from getting on, it makes it more difficult. The whole purpose of [ROKiT Flix]: it\u2019s free, families can just watch it and not worry about their pocketbooks, and it is safer than the other traditional forms of entertainment out there.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The co-founder and chairman discusses\u00a0the inspiration for the new service, how it utilizes AI, its various unique features and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1412,"featured_media":25191,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"pmpro_default_level":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,21],"tags":[7785,7784],"class_list":["post-25190","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","","category-interviews","category-top-stories","tag-jonathan-kendrick","tag-rokit-flix","pmpro-has-access"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v21.7 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/wordpress\/plugins\/seo\/ -->\n<title>ROKiT Flix\u2019s Jonathan Kendrick - TVKIDS<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"ROKiT Flix\u2019s Jonathan Kendrick - TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The co-founder and chairman discusses\u00a0the inspiration for the new service, how it utilizes AI, its various unique features and more.\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"TVKIDS\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2023-05-26T12:50:19+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2023-05-30T13:00:48+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/9\/2017\/07\/ROKiTFlix-JonathanKendrick-0523.jpg\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:width\" content=\"600\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:height\" content=\"397\" \/>\n\t<meta property=\"og:image:type\" content=\"image\/jpeg\" \/>\n<meta name=\"author\" content=\"Jamie Stalcup\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:card\" content=\"summary_large_image\" \/>\n<meta name=\"twitter:label1\" content=\"Written by\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data1\" content=\"Jamie Stalcup\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:label2\" content=\"Est. reading time\" \/>\n\t<meta name=\"twitter:data2\" content=\"7 minutes\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/\",\"name\":\"ROKiT Flix\u2019s Jonathan Kendrick - TVKIDS\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\"},\"datePublished\":\"2023-05-26T12:50:19+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2023-05-30T13:00:48+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/0da12602224807cc7b179b8405018deb\"},\"breadcrumb\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/#breadcrumb\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"BreadcrumbList\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/rokit-flixs-jonathan-kendrick\/#breadcrumb\",\"itemListElement\":[{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":1,\"name\":\"Home\",\"item\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\"},{\"@type\":\"ListItem\",\"position\":2,\"name\":\"ROKiT Flix\u2019s Jonathan Kendrick\"}]},{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/\",\"name\":\"TVKIDS\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":{\"@type\":\"EntryPoint\",\"urlTemplate\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/?s={search_term_string}\"},\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/worldscreen.com\/tvkids\/#\/schema\/person\/0da12602224807cc7b179b8405018deb\",\"name\":\"Jamie Stalcup\",\"description\":\"Jamie Stalcup is the executive editor of World Screen. 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