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HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Targeting Kids
An anonymous reader writes: The latest high-profile show to join one of the major streaming services probably isn't one you watch: Sesame Street. However, it's a clear signal for a growing trend: these services desperately want to corner the market on kid's shows. Netflix has gotten tons of praise for its original series, and it's been quietly putting that production power behind new shows aimed at children. They've also made deals with Disney and Dreamworks to get movies onto the service as quickly as possible. Amazon has been debuting series after series as well, with six pilots for new children's shows landing last month alone. "The battle for kids, at bottom, is about keeping their parents around even when a favorite show about a murderous politician is on hiatus. Streaming services are far easier to cancel and resubscribe than cable-TV ... so the goal is to make that decision harder." Now that HBO is starting to commit to streaming, it's faced with the same problems. By deriving their funding through subscriptions, these companies can avoid the flak YouTube and Hulu are getting for targeting kids with advertisements.
... these services desperately want to corner the market on kid's shows.
They desperately want to own more shares of commitments to deliver kid's shows than makers of kid's shows have committed to?
Sesame Street needs to do a segment explaining the definition of "corner the market".
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Maybe IBM can build a Watson module called "Mr Rogers" to do the explaining
If you're using a tablet as a babysitter it's useful to have access to kid programming. This seems like a no brainer for any of the streaming services.
Got the original Looney Tunes or Tom and Jerry cartoons.
Watch Wile E. Coyote drop a huge boulder on himself, or Tom and Jerry beat the crap out of each other.
Much better than wishing Dora and Boots would just get lost and never return, or watching the Wiggles get fat over the years.
I read "Targeting" as an allusion to weapons - taking aim with a firearm or dropped munitions.
The framing implies "very bad", so it makes sense to feel outraged when cigarette makers "target" teenagers, or liquor sellers "target" young adults, or spammers "target" old people.
Let's put this in perspective: HBO, Amazon, and Netflix aren't "targeting" kids, they are taking over a product that kids like. There's no evidence that Sesame Street is bad for kids in any realistic way.
On the flip side, if Game of Thrones is any indication, Sesame Street will be even higher quality than it is now, except that every episode a character will die :-)
PBS stations have always paid fees, representing substantial portions their budgets, for which they have to go panhandle to the public and companies. Now HBO picks up the tab. CTW makes 2x as many episodes, and PBS stations get that same content nine months later *for free.* I doubt children (mine included) will mind the 9 months of reruns during the initial delay.
From the Hulu FAQ: At this time, Hulu Kids is provided for Hulu subscribers without advertisements. While working with our content partners, we collaboratively decided that providing this hub ad-free is the best thing to do for this content.
TV. :(
OK. I have loser friends.
You are all goats. Goats say gleep. GLEEEEEP! GLEEEEEP! Gleep goats GLEEEEP! Gleep say the goats. YOU GOATS!!
C is for cookie! That's good enough for me!
Similar to the upcoming US election results
Wait just a second there are you saying the person paying the bill gets the finger while the kid gets ad free cartoons? WTF Hulu?
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
"To have the greatest market share in a particular industry without having a monopoly" is the definition that Wikipedia gave me.
Thanks. I stand corrected.
I was under the impression that "Cornering a Market" referred specifically to the first example they gave - holding more futures contracts than there is available material to fulfil, so one can hold the short-sellers up for whatever money you want - rather than the more general case of having control of enough of the supply, through ANY mechanism, that you can effectively dictate price.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The cartoons that we all loved when we were kids in the 70's absolutely blew. But the live action stuff was way worse for the most part. Other than Sesame Street and The Electric Company, we had miserable crap like Zoom and much worse... the stylings of Sid and Marty Croft.
Amazon is doing a pretty good job with their new series. They have Annedroids as a direct competitor to the old Saturday Morning live action stuff. It is hokey, and the CGI is low budget. But it is pretty entertaining to the elementary school crowd. Gortimer Gibbon's is sort of a twilight zone meets the Hardy Boys for elementary school kids. Also pretty entertaining and fairly well done - if you are in the target demo.
Nothing to the level of the animated stuff available from Disney, Nickelodeon or Cartoon Network though. Several of their animated series hold up from elementary all the way to adults. I really don't see college kids glomming onto any of these live action series as stoner favorites. So they aren't that great, but they are better than "Land of the Lost".
I'll see your Babar and raise you a "Fraggle Rock"
So stop using words like 'targeting'. There are no lost souls here, only entertainment and perhaps a bit education. I know how to count to ten in Spanish do this day thanks to Seseme Street; and I'm Canadian.
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Doozers!!
Laws are rules for the court, but merely a bottom bar to hit for life. Think beyond laws in your actions always.
Since the Internet's brought about a much closer link between research and marketing (think something like Facebook: they can conduct extensive experiments on their userbase, and do) this is more or less a recipe for really nailing down not just how to influence a kid toward products, but how to define the relations of products and people with each other and get the absolute most out of the situation.
It's not likely to be creating the ultimate drooling cretins slavering after plastic stuff, you have to think bigger for this. It's more about getting ownership of culture itself much like Sesame Street (funded by public television with a 'commons' educational message) became a cultural icon, and snuck lots of interesting things in there during its run.
Lots of effort went into optimizing how kids could learn, and then after that Blue's Clues went even further in optimizing both how kids learn and how they engage. This would be about probably ignoring how they learn (or selling the content to whoever's buying) and optimizing how they engage and how they make persistent connections with external products, brands and services. I don't think learning gets to be front and center when the funding is strictly 2015 corporate monster, and beyond. The whole concept of a common social interest in learning is basically shot at this point.
Could be worse. Could literally be Facebook. I think Amazon's a little more suspect than HBO. You have to look at what the primary agenda of the megacorporation in question is. HBO's branded entertainment. Amazon is more 'internet disruptive', so they have more of an agenda with children, much like if Uber was funding this.
Of course they're targeting kids; companies always have, in order to increase revenue by proxy.
No, what this story suggests to me is that the "for the children" narrative that usefully scares the right and center, is now being deployed in a way that might better trigger the anti corporate left.
-Styopa
Actually, Nick seems to want to be ESPN jr. They have dumped alot of their preshool programming and have some weird new emphasis no Nick Sports.
Cheap storage VM.
Here in Brazil the TV companies are trying to force companies like netflix to produce at least one content, before acting on the parents , I think it 's a shame . What do you think?
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