HBO, Netflix, and Amazon Targeting Kids 46
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.
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Sesame St. episode explaining "corner the market" (Score:2)
... 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".
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Maybe IBM can build a Watson module called "Mr Rogers" to do the explaining
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"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 yo
kid driven decisions (Score:1)
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Really, with a copy of get_iplayer a bit of patience you can grab Furchester Hotel, the new clangers, Dinopaws, Charlie and Lola, Shawn the Sheep, Timmy Time, Chuggington, In the Night Garden, Alphablocks (my 3 year old nephew is teaching himself to read with that one), Numtums and a whole bunch more. Head over to YouTube and there is a bunch of English language Masha and the Bear as well that youtube-dl will grab for you. Load onto tablet and/or install Plex. That's for the under 5 year market, and it's hu
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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 [youtube.com] enough for me! [youtube.com]
Fuck today's candy-assed crap (Score:1)
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.
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Targeting? WTF? (Score:5, Interesting)
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 :-)
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At kids? What the shit is your problem? Do you misunderstand basic things like metaphors or allusions? I guess not, because you used the word "allusion" already.
So you take target to mean "very bad"?
Netflix, and everyone else ever, want kids to watch. Not someone else's channel, but their own channel. HBO, Netflix, and Amazon are in this whole thing, actively.
Targeting being a bad thing? Yes, it really is, sa
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Targeting is the most appropriate word because they are not interested in helping children learn and develop, they are only interested in baiting them with content to target them with manipulative and psychological destructive ads https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org], "In the United Kingdom, Greece, Denmark, and Belgium advertising to children is restricted. In Quebec, Sweden and Norway advertising to children under the age of 12 is illegal." Will this ever happen in the United State of America, not bloody li
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Well basically "They're not advertising. HBO, Amazon and Netflix don't carry ads during programming", is a lie as a substantial amount of content is in fact product advertising masquerading as content (it's called merchandising).
Hulu does not target children with advertisements (Score:2)
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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?
I don't have any friends who let their kids watch (Score:2)
OK. I have loser friends.
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I'll see your Babar and raise you a "Fraggle Rock"
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Making some good kids shows (Score:2)
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 elementa
netflix != drug dealer (Score:2)
R&D (Score:2)
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 thin
No, someone else is being targeted (Score:2)
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.
What happens in Brazil (Score:1)
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Netflix (Score:1)