Explore every episode of the podcast Kids Media Club Podcast

Heath Kenny, Chief Content Officer at Miraculous Corp, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo for a conversation that covers a lot of ground — from how you steward an IP when its original creators are still in the room, to what it actually means to remain accountable to your characters after 170 episodes and a global fandom.

Miraculous Ladybug is eleven years old, has seven seasons, a billion lifetime views on Chibis alone, a live action series in development with Seesaw, a preschool spin-off, and a fanbase that spans from Brazilian Comic Con to teenagers who have been with it since they were eight. Heath’s job is to expand that universe without losing what made it work — and the conversation is as much about the philosophy of that as it is about the practicalities. The original creators are still there, still sense-checking, still pushing back, and Heath makes a compelling case that this is precisely why the brand has kept its elasticity rather than ageing down into a preschool corner like so many female-led IPs before it.

There’s a lot in here worth sitting with — the difference between reach and fandom, why fans feel more ownership of an IP when the original creators leave, what accountability to characters actually means in practice, and why Chibis went from an organic experiment to a genuine strand of the franchise in its own right. The promise of a future recording at the Miraculous Paris studio — with Thomas and Sebastian in the room — is one to hold the podcast to.

Recorded live at MIP Junior in Cannes, Jo grabs Andrew and Jonathan from Twin Atlas — the studio behind Creatures of Sonaria, one of Roblox’s deepest and most beloved game worlds — for a conversation that doubles as a preview of their panel session on stage an hour later.

Twin Atlas are at MIP Junior because the line between gaming and entertainment is blurring in real time, and Creatures of Sonaria is the proof. Built six years ago, grown through community co-creation, now moving into merchandise, licensing, an animated series on Sky, and active conversations around film — it’s the reverse distribution model that keeps coming up across kids media, this time born entirely on Roblox. The conversation covers how community-driven lore works as a content development engine, what authentic brand collaboration on Roblox actually looks like (the Avatar: Last Airbender event that brought Appa into the game as a playable creature is the standout example), and why Roblox’s safety investments — however painful in the short term for developers and the stock price — are the right long game.

• The episode’s sharpest moment is on data. Thirteen million concurrent players for the Bruno Mars concert versus eleven million NBA Finals viewers makes for a striking headline, but the more interesting point is what Roblox data can actually tell an IP owner: not just how many people showed up, but where they stood, what they interacted with, and which unexpected character became the event’s breakout star. That kind of behavioural intelligence is simply not available from broadcast, and Twin Atlas’s argument is that smart IP owners should be treating Roblox as a real-time testing ground for everything that comes after.

Emma Witkowski, VP of Media Solutions at WildBrain, returns to the podcast for a conversation that started as a LinkedIn exchange between her and Jo about trust in kids media and grew into something worth doing properly on the podcast.

The central argument is one that feels obvious once it’s stated but is surprisingly underserved in the industry conversation: reach and trust are not the same thing. Just because a platform can put content in front of millions of kids doesn’t mean it has earned the relationship that makes that content — and the advertising around it — actually land. Emma breaks trust down into three layers: parental confidence in the environment, children’s familiarity with characters and creators, and advertiser confidence in brand-safe context. All three are needed, and none of them is guaranteed by scale alone.

• The conversation covers co-viewing as the most undervalued audience segment in advertising right now, Gen Alpha’s role as household CMO and their inbuilt spam filter for inauthentic brand behaviour, the case for branded content over programmatic placement, and why joy should be a KPI not just a creative nice-to-have. Emma’s closing line is the one worth sitting with: stop asking whether kids audiences are worth investing in and start building the right ways to invest in them — because the long-term sustainability of kids content is genuinely at risk.

A live recording from MIP Junior in Cannes, with Andy, Emily and Jo grabbing Jon Mason, founder of Jollywise and creator of Stan and Gran, for a conversation that cuts against the grain of most MIP conversations. Instead of talking about how to get a show made, Jon is asking whether the show is the right format at all — and whether the industry is measuring the wrong things entirely.

The provocation at the heart of the discussion is a LinkedIn article Jon wrote questioning whether dwell time and views are sufficient metrics for kids content, at a moment when a World Economic Forum white paper on AI and children is asking the same question from a policy direction. Jon’s argument is that the industry has allowed data that is easy to collect — clicks, completion rates, engagement — to become the only data that matters, when what actually counts is what a child does after the content ends. Whether they go outside, ask a question, make something, explore. That’s much harder to measure, but arguably much more important. Bluey, he notes, are starting to think about exactly this.

• The conversation ranges across screen-free AI products (Mallow, Freckle, Yoto), the gap between the ed-tech world and the kids IP world that MIP could usefully bridge, the risk of AI companions that are permanently available and relentlessly sycophantic, and Jon’s core creative mission with Stan and Gran: getting kids outside. His closing challenge to the room is a good one — does your IP have to be a TV show? And if the answer is yes, are you absolutely sure?

This pre-MIP Junior sponsored episode brings Nicolas Eglau, Managing Director of EMEA, APAC and Global Distribution at Moonbug Entertainment, into conversation with Andy, Emily, and Jo. The timing is deliberate — Moonbug has a lot to talk about heading into Cannes.

Nicolas traces the logic of what he calls Moonbug's reverse distribution model: where traditional studios start with premium pay TV and work their way down to YouTube, Moonbug started on YouTube and has worked its way up — through premium streamers, linear channels in 100-plus markets, consumer products, gaming, live events, and now, with the Cocomelon movie landing in February, theatrical. Owning all of their IP outright is what makes the model work; it means no permissions to seek, no rights to negotiate, and the ability to move from idea to execution in months rather than years. The linear channel launch in the Philippines took five months from concept to air. Emmy's Wonder Wardrobe — a live action Little Angel spin-off built around a character the audience was already asking for — went from data insight to Disney and Netflix in similarly short order.

• The newest announcement is Big Feelings, a music company Moonbug has built to open up its distribution and monetisation infrastructure to third-party artists and creators — with Snoop Dogg and Doggyland among the first partners. It's a bet that what Moonbug has built for its own music-led IP can be valuable to others who have the talent but not the network. The episode closes on the Cocomelon movie, which Nicolas describes as the climax of everything the model has been building toward — and on which he is, emphatically, not scared.

A bonus mini episode from Jo, recorded at the Young Horizons Film Festival in Warsaw — a relatively small but well-curated industry event that she reports punching above its weight. Two conversations captured at cocktail hour, both worth hearing.

First, David Kleeman on why "a good story well told" is no longer enough as a creative ambition. His argument is that kids engage with stories through three fundamental need states — wanting to be involved, wanting to explore freely, and wanting to be part of a community — and that the industry keeps accidentally frustrating all three through IP protectionism, algorithmic curation, and age-gating from social spaces. His closing point is sharp: start with a core, let the audience tell you where they want to go next, and don't try to build everywhere at once.

Then Janine Weigold former Netflix executive now consulting across the industry, on the funding gap that nobody has solved: the space between an early idea and a full commission, where animation in particular keeps falling through the cracks. Her argument is that broadcasters, ad sales teams, and private companies with audience reach could function as incubators — offering channels, expertise, and promotional muscle to help creators find proof of concept before the big platforms come looking. The conversation ends on data sharing, where Janine is unambiguous: platforms hoarding engagement data isn't just bad for the industry, it's preventing the discovery of the next SpongeBob.

Jo is absent again, so Andy and Emily have a two-topic episode: first, the announcement of the Business of Children's Media Summit, taking place November 12th in Dublin; then a deep dive into Jeffrey Katzenberg's viral essay on AI and the future of animation.

Dennis Crushall from Precisify joins briefly to help launch the summit, which Emily has been quietly building for months in partnership with Cultural and Creative Industries Skillnet. Taking place at the Alex Hotel in Dublin, the day-long event is focused on going direct to audience — YouTube, gaming, consumer products, and franchise strategy — and features keynote speaker Erica Quinn, Director of Kids and Family Consumer Insights at Disney, alongside BBC Children's and Education's Anna Taganov. Tickets are €75 via Eventbrite, and there will be a live podcast recording on the day. Emily has also promised a pint of Guinness to every international attendee, a commitment Andy intends to make very expensive.

The second half is a sharp dissection of Katzenberg's 2,000-word Twitter essay positioning AI as the next Toy Story moment for Hollywood — expansive rather than destructive, with tech providing the tools and Hollywood providing the soul. Andy's most interesting observation is around the John Philip Sousa parallel Katzenberg draws: the real fight may not be about the technology at all, but about copyright compensation — and studios sitting on vast IP libraries, including the newly merged Paramount-Warner entity, could stand to benefit significantly if the law catches up. The episode closes on a fittingly ironic note: someone ran the essay through an AI checker and it came back 60% AI-generated.

🎟️ Get your tickets for the Business of Children's Media Summit: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-business-of-childrens-media-summit-tickets-1998215489319

📊 Explore Precisify's research and reports: https://www.precisify.com/reports-and-playbooks

Jo is thwarted by internet gremlins this week, so Andy and Emily press on without her. The Paramount-Warner merger has just cleared another significant regulatory hurdle — the California Attorney General's objections melted away after some well-timed brinkmanship — and Emily makes the case that from a kids media perspective specifically, a third major studio entity with the combined IP weight of Warner and Paramount is a genuinely good thing for the landscape. The question of whether the merged studio pulls its content from Netflix the way Disney did is examined, and Emily's read is that it won't be as extreme — but there are strategic decisions to be made around SpongeBob and other core franchises that will be worth watching closely.

The second half of the episode is a sharp conversation about digital-first animation and what it actually takes to make the model work. Sheriff Labrador's Baby Bus app background, Danny Go's live show operation, Ms. Rachel's multi-revenue approach — Emily's argument is that the YouTube-to-streaming pipeline is real but narrowing, and that the creators coming through now need to be running multi-line businesses from the start rather than betting the farm on YouTube revenue alone. It's a more structurally difficult proposition than the bubble moment that produced the current wave of creator IP, and the volume of new entrants who can pull it off is likely to be smaller going forward.

t's Netflix report week, and Emily is in the Mastermind chair as Andy and Jo work through the findings of the latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report. The big headline: Cocomelon has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time — a landmark moment for a show that, during the pandemic, was delivering engagement numbers the platform has never seen since.

The animated series rankings have stabilised into a consistent top three for the first time — Paw Patrol, Gabby's Dollhouse, and Peppa — with Teen Titans Go and SpongeBob making notable moves once US windows opened. Ms. Rachel's arrival in the top 10 is flagged as the biggest series development of the past year, and The Creature Cases gets its regular Emily mention as the quietly grinding Netflix original that still isn't getting the industry attention it deserves. The report also covers live action series for the first time, where Nickelodeon is doing particularly well, and there's a substantive conversation about the YouTube creator pipeline and what exclusivity actually means for kids content on Netflix. Netflix Playground, gaming, and the platform's decision to remain ad-free on kids content even for subscribers on the ad tier round out the episode.

A short emergency bonus episode with Emily, Andy, and Jo, recorded in real time as news breaks during Netflix report week. The Skydance Animation partnership with Netflix is coming to an end — and Emily has thoughts.

She walks through the arc of the deal, from its origins with Apple through the flip to Netflix, and makes the case that the timing makes sense: the Paramount-Warner merger consolidating means Skydance Animation has a natural new home in that pipeline. There's one more Skydance Netflix movie still to come — a Jack and the Beanstalk project — before the partnership winds down, and a fairy-tale themed musical called Steps lands around Thanksgiving this year. The bigger question Emily leaves hanging is what Netflix now does with its animated movie pipeline, given it's been publicly chasing Disney-level animation ambition for years and just lost a key supplier.

The silver lining she spots: independent animated movies grinding through theatrical release — Chicken Hare gets a namecheck — may suddenly find their streaming window conversations getting a lot more interesting.

The full trio are back in the room for the first time since the summer, and the episode opens with Emily's debrief from the Australian Children's Content Summit in Coffs Harbour — the warmth of the welcome, the flash mob at karaoke, and the more substantive observation that Australia has quietly built one of the richest kids YouTube creator ecosystems anywhere in the world. Bounce Patrol, Ms. Moni, Mikmax, Milo and Chip — the names keep coming, and Emily's point is that Screen Australia's own content hours reports aren't counting any of it.

The sharpest line from the Australia trip comes via Tina Harris of Lah-Lah Productions, whose framing of the divide between "creatives" and "creators" as a language problem rather than a values problem landed well on Emily's panel — and the consensus is that the ACCS is ahead of most conferences in actually putting both sides in the same room and letting them learn from each other.

The second half of the episode turns to the social media ban debate, which the trio are increasingly sceptical of — not because the concerns aren't real, but because banning access is being treated as a solution to what is fundamentally an algorithm problem. Jo's point that kids who get their understanding of the world from social media, and then discuss it around the dinner table, might actually be doing something more valuable than watching the 10 o'clock news is the episode's most provocative and worth sitting with. The closer is a reminder — via the WildBrain conversation — that kids are among the most commercially valuable audiences that exist, and that the industry has been too apologetic about making that case.

Emily has travelled to Coffs Harbour for the Australian Children's Content Summit, and this episode is her dispatches from the ground — a series of short, sharp conversations captured across the event with some of the key figures shaping Australian kids content right now.

First up is Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, who gives the clearest account of what happened to the Australian kids content industry when commercial broadcaster quotas were dropped in 2020 — and why the timing, colliding with the global streaming disruption, hit harder here than almost anywhere else. Then Suzanne Ryan, founder of both the ACCS itself and SLR Productions, on why she started the summit out of post-Covid isolation and producer fellowship — and why it landed at 260 attendees when she was hoping for 60. The episode also features a conversation with Barbara Stephens from Flying Bark Productions, whose studio is navigating the shift from traditional commissioning to digital-first IP development — including the freshly launched Doom Sweeper music video, which crossed 3 million YouTube views in its first weeks — and the argument that proof of concept is now proof of audience. As well as a discussion with Tina Harris, Co-Founder of Lah-Lah Productions.

The thread running through all of it is the same one dominating kids media conversations everywhere: the traditional funding model is gone, the YouTube creator economy is thriving alongside it, and the most interesting opportunity right now is in the conversation between those two worlds.

Emily is still in Australia, so Andy and Jo continue their deep dive into the toy industry with two guests from Bonkers Toys — Lisa Wright, Head of Licensing, and Julie Splendoria, VP of Marketing. It's a conversation that traces the arc from Slither.io and JoJo Siwa's bow to the present day, and makes a compelling case that Bonkers saw the YouTube-to-toy-aisle pipeline coming before almost anyone else in the industry.

The origin story is a good one: Bonkers' CEO spotted the opportunity literally from the driver's seat on the school run, watching his kids obsess over Slither.io on their phones, and moved fast enough to be the first licensee on Ryan's World when YouTube creator toys were still being dismissed by retailers as a niche fluke. Lisa and Julie walk through how the team reads fandom — the science of views and subscriber growth, and the harder-to-quantify art of emotional hook and community intensity — and how that methodology has evolved as the landscape shifted from YouTube to TikTok to Roblox. The "playable props" strategy developed for Toys and Colors — seeding supersized versions of toys into content nine months before retail launch — is a standout example of how to build familiarity authentically rather than just blasting product placement.

The episode closes with a Q4 outlook: unboxing and blind box collectibles, the ongoing Squishies evolution, sports trading cards, and the PopMart-influenced kidult trend are all flagged as the ones to watch heading into the holiday period. Whatnot gets a mention as a platform to take seriously. And Jo reveals she's been holding a Pokémon card the whole time.

Emily is somewhere over the Middle East en route to Australia, so Andy and Jo have been let loose on the podcast control desk — new buttons and all. The result is a slightly more multimedia episode than usual, with trailers played in and reacted to in real time, and a genuinely good conversation about what the summer's animation slate says about where the industry is heading.

Four things get the treatment. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie has just posted the franchise's strongest opening weekend ever — $20 million domestically, $69 million worldwide — and Andy and Jo make the case that the trailer reveals a show that has genuinely grown into itself, with sharper animation, better timing, and writers who clearly love the world. The Bluey movie teaser gets an equally warm reception, with Andy's observation that it chooses a falling balloon as its centrepiece moment — the smallest thing enlarged into the biggest thing — landing as the episode's neatest critical point.

Coco 2 prompts the more sceptical conversation: both Andy and Jo loved the original precisely because it felt complete, and the worry is that a sequel risks casting a shadow over something people remember with real tenderness. The Pixar slate discussion that follows — one original, Coco 2, an Incredibles spinoff — raises the question of whether the studio is in a defensive crouch. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit rounds things off: Disney reviving a century-old pre-Mickey character in a hybrid live action and hand-drawn animation style, which Andy and Jo read as both a smart copyright play and a meaningful reconnection with Disney's hand-drawn heritage.

John Baulch, publisher of Toy World magazine and the author of the Friday blog that has survived every newsletter cull Jo has ever attempted, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo for a wide-ranging conversation about the state of the toy industry in 2026 — which, it turns out, is in remarkably good shape.

John makes the case that the toy market is in a genuine purple patch: not driven by one breakout product creating supply chain chaos, but by four or five things working well simultaneously — Squishies, Pokémon, Lego, Toy Story merchandise, and the growing kidult phenomenon of adults buying collectibles for themselves. The conversation moves from evergreen IP and what Hasbro has done to revive Peppa Pig, to the fast-fashion end of the toy market: limited drops, chase figures, scarcity mechanics, and the PopMart model that the rest of the industry is now rapidly absorbing.

John's fast-fashion analogy is the sharpest frame in the episode — the idea that the toy industry is entering a phase where some product exists to thrill in the moment and disappear, just like a Primark seasonal range, and that this isn't a problem to be solved but a structural shift to be understood and managed. For anyone working in kids IP, licensing, or content who wants to understand how toys actually work in 2026, this is a very useful 40 minutes.

Jo and Emily are both away, so we’re revisiting two recent conversations that sit neatly together: one about the challenge of making original animated IP outside the Hollywood system, and one about the new frontier of creator-led cinema distribution.

First up is Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios and the team behind the Chicken Hare franchise — a case study in how a European studio can build original animated IP on a fraction of a US studio budget, through loyal distribution partners and a fully integrated model that keeps creative and commercial control under one roof. Then Caspar Nadaud of Piece of Magic Entertainment on what the Amazing Digital Circus and Iron Lung have revealed about cinema's new relationship with creator fandoms — and why the old gatekeeper model has given way to something far more collaborative and equal.

Both conversations are worth hearing in full — links to the original episodes are in the show notes.

Chickenhare

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000777023112

Creator Cinema

https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/kids-media-club-podcast/id1573404550?i=1000775115916

Andy and Jo are joined by Jason Tammemagi, Chief Creative Officer of Cartoon Saloon — the Oscar-nominated Irish studio behind The Secret of Kells, Song of the Sea, and Wolfwalkers — for a conversation that is as much about the philosophy of making things as it is about the business of animation.

Jason traces a career that moved from animator to director to studio founder before landing at Cartoon Saloon, where his brief is essentially to support the creative vision of founders Tom Moore, Paul Young, and Nora Twomey while keeping one eye on strategy and market. The core of the conversation is about what it actually takes to protect brave storytelling inside a risk-averse industry — and Jason is clear that the danger doesn't only come from outside the studio. Fear, he argues, is the story killer, and it operates as much in internal notes as it does in broadcaster development meetings. The instinct to sand off anything uncomfortable or gray-area is precisely what makes safe stories unsafe.

There's also a genuinely interesting thread on Cartoon Saloon's identity as a Kilkenny studio — why its Irish cultural specificity turned out to be a strength rather than a limitation, how the Secret of Kells was an act of creative bravery at a time when the entire industry was pivoting hard to CGI, and why Kilkenny being small enough that everyone walks to work turns out to matter more than it might seem. Jason's closing observation — that the industry has always been good at learning the wrong lessons — is one worth sitting with.

We're revisiting one of our favourite conversations — Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at Webtoon, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how Webtoon tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

Emily has been banging on about Chickenhare and the Hamster of Darkness for years, so she's delighted to have a professional reason to do it again. Matthieu Zeller, president and CEO of Belgium's nWave Studios, joins Andy, Jo, and Emily to talk about the Chickenhare franchise, whose second instalment — Chickenhare and the Secret of the Groundhog — is hitting cinemas now.

nWave is a 31-year-old studio with origins in stereoscopic 3D for IMAX and theme parks, and a track record of original animated features built on character-first storytelling, European financing, and budgets that are a fraction of what US studios spend. Matthieu is refreshingly direct about what that means: no massive battles or thousands-of-character set pieces, but a clarity of emotional storytelling that he argues can out-move the big studios when the script is right. The conversation gets into how nWave structures its financing through loyal European distribution partners, why constraints produce better creative work rather than worse, and why the mid-budget family animation that once anchored theatrical and DVD has been almost entirely forgotten by an industry fixated on franchises and streaming.

There's also a pointed argument running through the episode about who is actually underestimated in the room — and it's kids. Matthieu's view, backed up by test screenings, is that children handle sophisticated, layered storytelling far better than most adults in the industry give them credit for, and that the industry's tendency to dumb things down is both an insult and a missed opportunity. If you've ever wondered whether a good original family film can still get made outside the studio system, this episode is the answer.

A bonus episode timed ahead of Netflix's earnings call, with Andy and Jo putting questions to Emily as she and her team prep the next Netflix Kids Content Performance Report. The conversation starts with the Warner deal Netflix walked away from, and what that decision — clinical, unmathematical, uncharacteristically restrained — reveals about where Netflix thinks its gaps actually are.

From there it's into the data: second seasons not landing as hard, the hit-making machine feeling slightly less reliable, and the structural tension between binge-model engagement and the habit-forming retention Netflix is now chasing. Kids content, Emily argues, is central to solving that problem — it's the most habitually consumed content on any platform — which makes Netflix's growing investment in the space (YouTube creator acquisitions, the Playground gaming app, no ads on kids profiles even on the ad tier) start to look less opportunistic and more strategic.

The harder question the episode lands on is whether Netflix is actually in the business of building IP, or just exceptionally good at acquiring other people's. K-Pop Demon Hunters was lightning in a bottle — brilliant, defining, not a strategy. Emily's view is that Netflix's note is aggregation, not origination, and the Warner pursuit was less about content ambition and more about filling a catalogue gap they can't otherwise close.

Takeaways:

• In this episode, we discussed the implications of Netflix's recent data drop on children's content and engagement metrics.
• We examined how Netflix's shift from subscriber growth to engagement metrics reflects a significant corporate strategy adjustment.
• The discussion highlighted the challenges Netflix faces with second seasons not performing as strongly as expected, raising concerns about content sustainability.
• We noted the increasing competition among children's programming, particularly how established properties like Ms. Rachel are reshaping engagement on the platform.
• The podcast emphasized Netflix's strategic positioning as a safe alternative to YouTube for children's content, focusing on curated and ad-free viewing experiences.
• We explored the significance of Netflix's kids app and gaming offerings in enhancing viewer retention and engagement for younger audiences.

Links referenced in this episode:

• kidsmediaclub.substack.com
• youtube.com

Three guests on one episode — Oliver and Alvaro, co-founders of Telos Media and the team behind Solar Balls (half a billion views on the English channel alone, 2 billion across all languages), and Mary James, the Hollywood-experienced executive producer who bridges their digital-first world and the mainstream. Together they've just launched Run Monster Run, a new animated IP that hit 20 million views within two weeks of its pilot dropping on YouTube — and they're already fielding inbound interest from platforms.

The conversation covers the full playbook: how Solar Balls went from zero to 100,000 subscribers in 10 days and turned profitable within a month; why YouTube was chosen as the launch platform for Run Monster Run over a traditional pitch route; how Discord functions as a fandom hub that sits outside the algorithm; and how Alvaro manages fan engagement with a deliberately mysterious, Easter-egg-heavy approach that keeps communities theorising and proactive without burning through the IP's future potential. The team is refreshingly candid about what they're looking for in a platform partner — and equally clear that they don't need one to proceed.

The episode also gets into what makes Run Monster Run different from the current wave of independent animation: a deliberately broad, multigenerational emotional premise, complex lore built for long-term storytelling, and the creative discipline not to show everything at once. A team of 122 people, a theme song co-written by the creators of the Paw Patrol theme, and a shorts strategy designed to deepen character rather than just fill a feed. This one is worth watching closely.

Caspar Nadaud, founder of theatrical distribution company Piece of Magic Entertainment, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo to unpack exactly how The Amazing Digital Circus went from a YouTube finale to a global cinema event — and what it reveals about the new relationship between creators, fandoms, and the big screen. Piece of Magic handled European distribution and helped take the Glitch-produced finale to roughly $14 million across 38 markets, with the film's combined US, Canada, and European box office likely exceeding $50 million once Latin America and Asia are factored in.

Caspar walks through the mechanics in detail: why engagement, not follower count, is the real predictor of cinema success; why scarcity (limited cinemas, a tight release window) actually amplifies fandom rather than suppressing it; and why The Amazing Digital Circus's event-model release strategy — concentrating nearly all box office into one mobilised weekend — differed sharply from the slower, word-of-mouth build of Markiplier's Iron Lung. He's candid about the projects that didn't work, where huge YouTube numbers didn't translate to engaged, mobilisable audiences, and about how Piece of Magic is still learning to read which fandoms will actually show up.

The conversation also covers the changing power dynamic between distributors and creators — a genuine partnership model rather than the old gatekeeper relationship — and closes with a tease of Piece of Magic's next major announcement, plus a broader reflection on cinema's surprising post-pandemic resurgence, driven in large part by Gen Z's appetite for communal, dressed-up, FOMO-driven theatrical moments.

A crossover episode with Eric Calderon of Surviving Animation, recorded with Andy and Eric fresh off the ground in Annecy while Jo and Emily nurse their FOMO from home. It's the second collaboration between the two podcasts, and the energy carries that — equal parts industry analysis and genuine enthusiasm for the world's oldest animation festival, which Eric was attending for the first time in 14 years.

Eric's framing of Annecy as "the perfect picnic" runs through the whole conversation: a rare alignment of factors — a beautiful lake town, a film festival with genuinely pure independent roots, a market (MIFA) that hasn't been allowed to swallow the festival whole, and a decentralised structure that means choosing one screening means missing five others. The AI conversation gets a sharper edge than in other episodes: Eric describes a genuinely tribal atmosphere, where it's socially acceptable to be loudly anti-AI but considered "punching down" to push back the other way. Both Eric and Andy note the split between students nervous about junior roles disappearing and senior executives trying to figure out workflow integration, with a quieter middle ground that exists but speaks less loudly.

Anime emerges as the other dominant theme — not as a trend but as something Eric compares to hip-hop: permanently embedded in the culture, with everyone from the Tokyo government to a hitchhiking Czech animation collective to Warner Bros trying to find their way in. Eric's term for non-Japanese anime-influenced work, "cowboy anime," gets a real airing, alongside the Toei Animation producer's prediction that the future of anime won't be exclusively Japanese-made. There's also a sharp, important critique buried in the conversation: Eric's worry that Annecy is drifting toward becoming a B2C event dominated by corporate slate announcements, and his observation that the real energy and the real audience — the students lining up in the banlieue — are being overlooked by an industry fixated on the Imperial hotel crowd. The episode closes, fittingly, with Eric plugging his Flow-licensed merchandise line and everyone agreeing to make it to Annecy together in person next year.

Andy is calling in from Annecy — sunglasses on, rosé imminent, 45 minutes from his accommodation in 38-degree heat — while Jo and Emily hold the fort from home. It's a short, lively check-in from the world's oldest animation festival, and the main topic writing itself on every wall in town is AI.

Andy reports that the conversation around AI at Annecy has meaningfully shifted from previous years. The theoretical debate about what AI might mean for animation has largely given way to the practical reality of studios working out how to use it. Students remain understandably anxious about junior roles being squeezed — the very rung of the ladder they need to get started — while producers and execs are focused on workflow integration. Andy's prediction is that a distinct "AI animation" category will eventually become as meaningless as "CGI animation" did after Toy Story: it'll be everywhere, and it'll stop being a label.

There's also a quick and genuinely useful primer on how Annecy actually works — the Imperial, MIFA, the old town, the meetings by the lake, the producers dashing between venues who've badly underestimated the distances — for anyone who hasn't been and is thinking about going. Jo and Emily are already planning next year.

It's been a year since K-Pop Demon Hunters dropped on Netflix — quietly, in June 2025, without much fanfare, to a modest first week. The trio mark the anniversary with a look back at how the phenomenon actually unfolded, and a frank assessment of where the franchise goes from here.

Emily, Andy, and Jo piece together the real story of the IP's growth: the music videos Netflix pushed to YouTube that first weekend, the summer rewatches that let kids learn the dances, the back-to-school moment that supercharged playground currency, and the 300-plus fan-made Roblox experiences that confirmed something genuinely generational was happening. The consensus is that the slow-burn launch wasn't a failure of marketing — it may have been the making of it.

• The harder conversation is about what comes next, with a sequel not arriving until 2029. Netflix has done impressive franchise work — Hasbro and Mattel deals, late night appearances, NFL halftime shows, an Oscar — but a year in, there's still no new story content. The trio have thoughts on what that gap needs, and aren't shy about sharing them.

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Netflix
• Hasbro
• Mattel

The band is back together — and Jo has news. She's joined Coolabi as SVP of Digital, with a brief that includes Warrior Cats: a book IP 74 volumes deep, a Roblox game at 730 million visits, a Tencent animation in production, and one of the most voracious fandoms in kids media. It's a good segue into the episode's main subject.

Amazing Digital Circus was supposed to have a four-day cinema run. It's now been extended to eight weeks, has outgrossed every independent animated movie in its window, and is cosplay screenings are selling out. The trio use it to pick up the thread from last week's creator movie conversation — but this time with a focus on what it means structurally. Creators who own their IP are coming into rooms with broadcasters and studios from a position of security rather than permission, and the entertainment industry is only beginning to reckon with what that shift means for how rights deals get structured.

The conversation also takes a sharp turn into social media regulation and what an under-16 ban would actually mean for the kind of co-created fandom that put Amazing Digital Circus in cinemas in the first place — Kane Parsons, after all, taught himself Blender on Discord at 14. It's the episode's most unresolved and most important thread, and one the podcast will clearly be returning to.

A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing successive weeks of audience growth in theatres. The last film to do that was E.T.

The conversation goes beyond the hot takes to ask what's actually driving it. Andy and Jo's argument is that this isn't really about filmmaking — it's about trust, built slowly, over years of showing up for an audience before it ever made commercial sense to do so. The parasocial relationships these creators have with their fans are something no studio can manufacture, and the co-created lore around something like Backrooms means audiences don't just watch the film — they feel they made it. Mr. Beast is the useful counterexample: so big he's effectively become the kind of corporate entity his audience was rooting against.

The episode then pivots to what all of this might mean for kids and teens media specifically — from the structural problem of COPPA preventing younger audiences from participating in the kind of creative sandpits that made Backrooms possible, to whether Roblox game adaptations like 99 Nights in the Forest could replicate the Minecraft movie moment, to the genuinely exciting question of what happens when this generation of creators starts having kids of their own.

A hosts' deep dive with Andy and Jo, recorded in the middle of a British heatwave with Emily absent. Jo has spent the last six months tracking the top 50 sports games on Roblox daily, and this episode is her five-takeaway breakdown of what that data reveals about how teenage sports fandom actually works — and how far behind most sports organisations are in understanding it.

The headline finding is counterintuitive: official, licensed sport consistently underperforms unofficial, developer-originated games on Roblox. The NFL, Premier League, and FIFA all have a presence on the platform; none of them come close to games built from scratch by teenage developers who simply love their sport. Jo's argument is that this isn't just a platform quirk — it's a window into how this generation relates to fandom itself. Volleyball, driven by the anime series Haikyuu, is currently one of the biggest sports categories on Roblox despite being nowhere near football in real-world popularity. Almost every top-performing sports game, across every sport, has an anime aesthetic. And the primary game loop isn't playing the sport — it's hanging out, looking good, and being social with friends. The tribal rituals of going to a match are being replicated in digital space, just dressed differently.

The episode is essential listening for anyone in sports media, rights ownership, or brand strategy who is trying to understand where the next generation of fans is actually spending their time — and why turning up on Roblox with broadcast-mode thinking and a calendar of big events is precisely the wrong approach.

Halle Stanford has spent almost 30 years at the Jim Henson Company — executive producing Fraggle Rock, creating Sid the Science Kid — and has just launched Wowsabout, a new puppet preschool special on PBS Kids about a guitar-playing hedgehog and a tree-loving pig out to see the wows of the world. It's the first preschool show built around the emotion of awe, and it's already outperforming existing PBS Kids IP on YouTube within two weeks of release.

The conversation covers how Wowsabout got made — and it wasn't through a conventional commissioning deal. Halle built a coalition of mission-aligned partners, leaned into the science behind awe in a way that opened unexpected doors, and had to be, as the Jim Henson Company calls her, the queen of pivot at every turn. There's also a robust defence of puppetry as a medium — Halle has thoughts on the "puppets don't travel" orthodoxy, and they're worth hearing.

Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at WEBTOON, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through to screen.

It's a genuinely different development model — one where audience investment is baked in before a single frame of animation is made. Sydney explains how WEBTOON tracks not just read counts but comment engagement, retention, and emotional intensity of fan response as signals for adaptation potential. The conversation gets into what it actually takes to translate a webcomic into animation, how to honour a fanbase that feels genuine ownership of a property, and why that kind of proven, community-built IP is increasingly what streamers want to see walk through the door.

There's a lot of ground covered — Wattpad's role within the same parent company, the upcoming Lore Olympus series with Amazon Prime, the titles on Sydney's radar for the 6 to 16 demographic, and what her animation students at Loyola Marymount are watching right now, which turns out to be a surprisingly useful window into where the industry is heading next.

A viral YouTube video calling Bluey's deal with the ABC "the shittest deal ever" has set Australian media alight — and sent Andy, Emily, and Jo straight to the recording button. The claim: zero dollars from Bluey's global success ever made it back to Australia. The reality, as the trio unpick it, is considerably more complicated.

This is a bonus episode that uses the viral moment as a jumping-off point for a much more interesting conversation: about what the ABC could realistically have done differently, why BBC Studios was able to turn Bluey into a global phenomenon when a public service broadcaster structurally couldn't, and what the whole debate exposes about the impossible tension at the heart of PSB commissioning everywhere.

• The "zero dollars back to Australia" claim doesn't hold up — Moose Toys' Bluey toy deal alone drove an estimated $800 million into the Australian economy, and is itself a strong example of the entrepreneurial Aussie spirit the video claims is absent.
• Hindsight makes Bluey look like an obvious bet — it wasn't — the deal was struck during a period of internal ABC disarray, at a moment when Disney+ was an enormous and unproven gamble. Nobody knew this would work.
• The ABC keeping the rights wouldn't automatically have produced the same outcome — BBC Studios had a specific YouTube-first, global distribution strategy and the infrastructure to execute it. The ABC still geoblocks Bluey and doesn't have a meaningful franchise team.
• Public service broadcasters are structurally constrained from thinking globally — their local taxpayer remit is both their purpose and their commercial ceiling, and that tension isn't going away.
• You can't engineer a Bluey by trying to make a Bluey — the shelf space for behemoth kids IP is finite, cycles slowly, and the creators who break through are focused on making something good, not replicating something that already exists.

The second episode in the Kids Media Club's sponsored series with WildBrain Media Solutions brings in Emma Witkowski, WildBrain's VP of Media Solutions. The topic is one the podcast has been circling for a while: kids and family audiences have migrated to YouTube and FAST, but the advertising money largely hasn't followed — and the reasons are more structural than most people in the industry realise.

Emma unpacks why the standard programmatic buying infrastructure effectively locks advertisers out of Made for Kids environments, why COPPA compliance is being misread as a liability when it should be a selling point, and why Gen Alpha's influence on household purchasing decisions makes this audience far more commercially valuable than the ad market currently prices in.

It's a practical, clear-eyed conversation about how kids media gets funded, why that funding model is under pressure, and what a better approach looks like — essential listening for anyone working in or around kids content who needs to get their head around the ad landscape in 2026.

Key Takeaways:

• Ad dollars haven't followed the audience because the buying infrastructure is broken for kids — major DSPs either block Made for Kids inventory or have it turned off by default, and most brands don't know why.
• COPPA compliance is being misread as a barrier when it should be a selling point — Made for Kids environments are among the most brand-safe digital spaces available, but they're invisible to data-driven programmatic platforms.
• Gen Alpha are the household CMO — 89% of parents say their kids influence travel decisions, 80% say kids influence where the family eats, and the influence extends to cars and subscriptions too.
• Trust is the new currency in kids advertising — parents who grew up with the internet are becoming more intentional about ad environments, and structural compliance is winning over reactive compliance.

Episode Title:

This is a special compilation episode revisiting two of the Kids Media Club's most popular conversations on kids online safety — with Ashley Mady from Zigazoo and Chris Heatherly, former General Manager of Club Penguin at Disney. With regulation around kids social media still very much in flux, it felt like the right moment to bring these two perspectives together.

Ashley walks through how Zigazoo works — challenge-based, fully moderated, no bots, no personally identifiable information — and makes the case that safe social media for kids isn't an oxymoron, it's a design choice. The platform's hybrid AI and human moderation model, its age-gated content tiers, and its wishlist-to-parent email feature all point to what's possible when child wellbeing is built into the product from the ground up rather than bolted on afterwards. When TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo kids told them how to behave — which is probably the most compelling endorsement of a platform's culture imaginable.

Chris brings the historical weight. Club Penguin at its peak had 200 million registered avatars and was, as he puts it, the biggest playground in the world — and his job was to keep it safe and keep it fun. The corporate story is a cautionary one: Disney's MBA-led strategy teams couldn't quantify the value of community, and the platform was eventually shut down despite fierce internal opposition. But the emotional legacy Chris describes — kids who found belonging and identity on Club Penguin that they couldn't find at school — is a reminder of what's genuinely at stake when these platforms get it right.

A bonus episode with Andy and Jo, fresh off the plane from Content Europe in Lisbon, where both were on panels and Jo was moderating. Emily is absent this week, so the two debrief on the themes that dominated the conference.

The defining question that ran through almost every session was deceptively simple: what even is a hit anymore? A show can hit 200 million YouTube views and still not be financially viable. That gap between attention and money, Andy and Jo agree, is not self-correcting — and without investment flowing back in on terms that make sense for kids content, the market risks stalling further. The advertising conversation is equally candid, with Jo pointing to WildBrain Media Solutions and Lumi as two companies actively trying to solve the COPPA problem by taking kids YouTube inventory out of the programmatic black box and selling it directly to advertisers.

Jo closes with the sharpest observation of the episode: that kids media has quietly allowed tech company measurement frameworks — 28-day windows, engagement metrics, short-term return expectations — to define success in a space that has never worked that way. You can't speed run fandom. Patient capital is the only kind that works in kids media, and the industry needs to say so louder.

Key Takeaways:

1. "What is a hit?" is now genuinely an open question — the old definition (big linear partner, west coast origin, strong ratings) no longer holds, and the panel at Content Europe couldn't agree on a replacement, which is itself telling.
2. Attention and revenue have been decoupled, and the industry hasn't yet found a reliable way to bridge them. 200 million YouTube views doesn't automatically translate to financial viability for the producers who made the content.
3. WildBrain and Lumi are testing a direct sales model for kids YouTube inventory — selling contextually against known IP rather than through programmatic systems, which offers advertisers brand safety and producers a better commercial deal.
4. Connected TV co-viewing changes the advertising calculus — when a child watches YouTube on the living room TV, a parent is often in the room. That audience is more valuable and more brand-safe than mobile-first viewing, and the industry is only beginning to price that in.
5. Platform native, not platform everywhere — the shift observed across multiple Lisbon panels is from spray-and-pray digital distribution to intentional, platform-specific strategy: YouTube as top of funnel, FAST as destination viewing, streaming partners for deeper engagement.
6. Tech company measurement frameworks don't fit kids media — 28-day Netflix windows, short-term engagement metrics, and VC-style return expectations are being applied to an industry where fandom takes years to build and IP value compounds over decades.
7. Patient capital is the only capital that works in kids — and the industry needs to make that case more deliberately to investors, rather than trying to fit kids IP into frameworks designed for SaaS companies or adult entertainment.
8. The swing back to curated, intentional viewing is good news for kids content — audiences paralysed by infinite choice are gravitating back towards scheduled, lean-back experiences, which plays to the strengths of well-programmed kids IP on FAST and connected TV platforms.

This episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast is part of a sponsored series produced in partnership with WildBrain Media Solutions. We get together with Kate Smith, EVP of Audience Engagement at WildBrain to talk about what constitutes a TV Network in 2026.

Within the industry the term "distribution" has evolved. Kate opens by sharing how WildBrain has pioneered its own Network, driven by TV viewing insights. The company has quietly become one of the dominant operators in kids' FAST channels and on YouTube, holding over 50% of all kids and family channels across major FAST platforms in the US and operating 800 YouTube channels.

We explore how YouTube and FAST serve different but complementary functions — YouTube as a discovery engine, FAST as a destination for fans who already know what they want — and why legacy IP with multigenerational appeal continues to drive the strongest long-form viewing numbers.

1. https://bit.ly/WBMSCapabilities

Episode Title: Netflix Playground: Is Netflix Building the Answer to YouTube Kids? — A Kids Media Club Bonus Episode

Episode Summary:

A short bonus episode with Andy and Emily Horgan, recorded to react to a significant announcement from Netflix that landed while Emily was on holiday — which she notes felt like being deliberately trolled. Netflix has launched the Netflix Playground app, a dedicated gaming environment aimed at preschoolers and young children, and Emily has thoughts.

The context matters here. Emily and her team published a Netflix gaming report back in December, identifying two structural problems with how Netflix games worked: first, users had to download games as separate apps and log in via their Netflix account rather than accessing them seamlessly within the platform; and second, kids games weren't available within kids profiles, creating an awkward tension between safety and discoverability. Shortly after publishing, the Netflix gaming team reached out to acknowledge the issues — and Playground is, in effect, their response.

The app is pitched at eight and under, though Emily reads it as skewing younger still. It's ad-free with no in-app purchases, and the integration with Netflix accounts is noticeably more seamless than what came before. The content mix is interesting: alongside expected IP like Peppa Pig and Sesame Street, there are a handful of Dr. Seuss titles, StoryBots (which Netflix owns outright), and — the pick that catches Emily's attention most — Bad Dinosaurs. She reads that inclusion as a signal that Netflix is thinking about underleveraged IP: shows that proved sticky and connected with audiences but were left as one-and-done, with all that demonstrated audience value sitting idle. The same announcement also included a renewal for Trash Truck, a soft preschool show with no new content since 2021 that has nonetheless been quietly hanging around in the Netflix data — the kind of quiet buoyancy, Emily argues, that deserves attention.

The bigger question the episode circles is whether Netflix Playground could become a genuine walled-garden alternative to YouTube Kids. Emily's instinct when she first saw the announcement was that this could be exactly that — a fully curated, safe digital environment for young children. At launch it's games only, with no video streaming, and the games themselves lean gentle: jigsaws, colouring, slow-paced play. Emily is genuinely on the fence about whether combining video and games in a single environment would be a good thing for that age group, and notes that parents she's spoken to tend to want a clear distinction between screen-time modes. But the underlying observation stands: YouTube Kids, for all its reach, is algorithmically curated and carries a lot of content that isn't exactly nutritious. If Netflix were to go further with Playground, there's a real gap it could fill.

The app launched in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand — but not Ireland, which Emily takes as a personal slight.

Key Takeaways:

1. Netflix Playground is a dedicated kids gaming app aimed at eight and under, ad-free and with no in-app purchases — a direct response to the discovery and safety problems Emily's team had identified and published in their Netflix gaming report.
2. The login and access experience is significantly more seamless than Netflix's previous gaming setup, which required separate app downloads and created friction for both parents and kids.
3. The IP selection is telling — Bad Dinosaurs and Trash Truck both signal that Netflix is paying attention to underleveraged content with proven audience buoyancy, rather than defaulting only to its biggest franchises.
4. Quiet persistence in viewing data is worth watching — Trash Truck has had no new content since 2021 yet continues to hang around in Netflix engagement numbers. Emily argues that this kind of staying power without activation is a meaningful signal.
5. The walled-garden question is the big one — Netflix Playground has the potential to position itself as a curated, safe alternative to YouTube Kids, but at launch it's games only, and whether video content follows remains to be seen.
6. Netflix's gaming momentum is deliberate and sustained — this isn't a one-off launch left to find its own level. The Playground app is the latest in a series of iterative moves that suggest gaming is a genuine strategic priority, not an experiment.
7. YouTube Kids has a quality problem that a well-executed Netflix alternative could exploit — algorithmic curation means content of variable quality gets through, and parents of young children are an audience actively looking for something more controlled and curated.

Episode Summary:

Jo is away in Lisbon for this episode, leaving Andy and Emily Horgan to kick things off with a discussion about a timely YouTube Culture and Trends report — Animation's New Wave: How Independent Online Animators Are Reshaping the Entertainment Industry — before bringing in a guest who feels almost like the report's cover star: indie animator and creator Emily Brundige of Strawberry Vampire.

The episode opens with Andy and Emily Horgan picking apart the YouTube report, which surveyed 614 animation fans aged 14 to 24 and found that the majority prefer watching indie animated series on YouTube over major studio output, and that over half watch animation content in languages other than their own. Emily Horgan is candid about the report's limitations — the sample size is modest, and the framing is clearly designed to serve YouTube's own commercial interests — but argues that the very fact YouTube has invested in packaging and publishing this data is itself meaningful. It signals that independent animation on the platform is something YouTube is actively trying to cultivate, not just observe. The Amazing Digital Circus is cited as the headline proof of concept.

The discussion quickly turns to two creators who are living the indie animation reality right now. Tiny Chef — the beloved stop-motion show that started as an indie project, got picked up by Nickelodeon, and was then cancelled in the fallout from the Paramount/Skydance gridlock — is highlighted as an instructive case study in building an ecosystem around a show. The viral cancellation clip that made it onto Good Morning America was the moment, but what mattered as much as the moment was the infrastructure already in place: the Instagram following, the merch website, the email list, the Fwiend Club membership community. Brand partnerships with Greggs and IKEA have since followed — a smart alignment of the chef IP with food and home brands — though Emily Horgan raises the very real challenge of knowing how to value those deals when you have no background in commercial negotiations and your back is against the wall.

The second half of the episode brings in Emily Brundige directly, joining from Little Toughy Studio for a check-in on Strawberry Vampire. When the pilot animatic launched last Halloween on a channel with just 2,000 subscribers, it got 60,000 views in 48 hours and has since passed 200,000. A passionate fandom has formed around a show that, at this point, consists of an animatic and a handful of shorts. Now, with a second Kickstarter running — this time with a larger goal so she can actually pay her collaborators properly — she's at 79% funded with six days to go. She describes the campaign as a tight basketball match she's still watching closely, but the response has already validated the core question she was testing: whether fans who love the IP would put their hand in their pocket to make more of it.

Emily Brundige is refreshingly open about the reality of being a one-person studio and one-person marketing operation simultaneously. The Substack she launched after her first appearance on the podcast now has over 1,000 readers, feeding back into her YouTube channel and building genuine two-way momentum. The Kickstarter rewards are thoughtfully designed — plushie keychains, pins, stickers, custom painted resin figures by animation industry heavyweights including Penn Ward, Patrick McHale, Lauren Faust, and Jorge Gutierrez — and she's offered ten backers the chance to appear as background characters in the animatic, a clever fandom participation play. The episode ends with Andy and Emily Horgan pledging $150 to get the Kids Media Club podcast a thank you in the credits.

Running through the whole conversation is a broader point about what quality means in independent animation. Both Emilys and Andy observe that audiences — particularly the 14-to-24 demographic YouTube is courting — are perfectly happy watching animatics if the characters and story resonate. The definition of production quality is shifting, and authenticity and community are increasingly the things that build lasting audiences, not polish.

Support Emily Brundige's Strawberry Vampire Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strawberryvampire/strawberry-vampire-help-us-make-the-next-episode

Key Takeaways:

1. YouTube's indie animation report is as much a strategic signal as a data release — the platform is actively trying to cultivate independent animation as a category, and the report is a way of giving that ecosystem legitimacy and visibility.
2. The 14-to-24 demographic is driving indie animation — YouTube's data points to this age group as the primary audience, and notably the report focuses entirely on them rather than the under-13s. The kids designation remains commercially and regulatorily thorny for creators on the platform.
3. Tiny Chef's story shows that infrastructure matters as much as the viral moment — the cancellation clip went massively viral, but the email list, merch site, and community membership already in place meant they could convert that attention into sustainable support.
4. Brand partnerships are a viable revenue lever for indie creators, but knowing how to value them without commercial experience is a real challenge that the industry hasn't yet solved for independent producers.
5. Crowdfunding works best when the audience is built before the campaign launches — Emily Brundige's advice is to start collecting emails well in advance of a Kickstarter, giving fans notice and building a list of people who have already signalled they'll support the project.
6. Building in public creates authenticity and fandom — sharing the process of making a show from the animatic stage outward turns production transparency into a community-building tool, and audiences respond to that inclusion.
7. Quality is being redefined by independent animation — audiences who love a show's characters and story will watch animatics, shorts, and work-in-progress content. Full production polish is no longer a prerequisite for building a devoted following.
8. Creative freedom is one of indie animation's most underrated advantages — Emily Brundige contrasts over a decade in traditional studios, where creators have no say over merch or IP decisions, with the indie model where she can commission a comic, make merch decisions, and shape the universe entirely on her own terms.
9. The ecosystem around an IP matters as much as the IP itself — Substack, YouTube, email lists, Kickstarter, merch, and brand partnerships are all parts of the same machine, and indie creators who build across all of them have multiple ways to sustain their work.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. kidsmediaclubpodcast.com

This episode, sponsored by Innov8 Creative Academy and Deddy Bears, sees Andy and Emily joined by two guests who met through a thoroughly Irish chain of mutual acquaintances and ended up building something genuinely unusual together. Gavin Lawler is the founder of Innov8 Creative Academy — a toy inventor and entrepreneur with over 250 IPs in his portfolio and a background that includes the Irish Fairy Door Company. Chris Dicker is a kids media showrunner and creator with a long career in the industry, including time at Jam Media. They're currently collaborating on Deddy Bears: a creepy-cute collectible toy brand that has sold over 10 million units in under three years and is now moving into content, with a YouTube series in production and a feature film in development.

Gavin opens by telling the story of the Irish Fairy Door Company — half a million units sold at twenty pounds each in Ireland, a business that worked brilliantly at home but struggled to translate internationally because the Irishness was too specific and the product too niche. The lesson he took from it was the need to design for a global audience from the outset. Since then, Innov8 Creative Academy has built a reputation as a rapid trend-identification and commercialisation machine — the Six7 plush is cited as an example of a product that went from a six-hour design turnaround to hundreds of thousands of units sold in a matter of weeks. The model is built on firing small bullets: get to market fast and cheaply, test sell-through, and only scale what lands.

Deddy Bears emerged from a 36-hour design sprint for a Walmart Canada Halloween brief. The buyer initially chose a different product, but when that proved too complex to execute, Deddy Bears got the slot by default — and promptly achieved 86% sell-through in its first season, opening doors to major retailers across 50 countries. The bears come in coffins with death certificates, each character has a backstory ranging from ancient Egypt to the modern day, and the whole thing sits in that now-familiar cultural territory occupied by Wednesday Addams, Stranger Things, and Five Nights at Freddy's: once-alternative content that has been thoroughly normalised for family audiences and is, as Gavin puts it bluntly, extracting cash from people's pockets.

The conversation that forms the heart of the episode is about what happens when these two worlds — fast-cycle toy invention and long-form IP development — collide. Chris describes arriving into a brand that already had a fandom and realising his first job was simply to listen: to go to New York Toy Fair, watch the fans and influencers, understand who was actually buying the bears and why, before writing a single word. What he found surprised him — a remarkably wide demographic ranging from children collecting blind bags to 20-something women forming deep emotional attachments to the characters, caring about packaging, wanting to know the lore. The Giphy page Gavin's wife Aoife created as a half-joke hit 10 million shares within weeks of launch, including a front-page feature on April Fool's Day, and neither Gavin nor Chris fully saw it coming.

There's a genuinely interesting structural argument running through the episode about the relationship between content and IP. Chris's view — shaped by coming into a brand that already had proven market demand — is that content doesn't always have to carry all the weight; sometimes it exists to support IP rather than create it. Gavin's perspective is that the toy market has always needed to fire small bullets and test quickly, and that traditional media could learn from this rather than committing millions upfront in the hope that an audience materialises. Both agree that character, not plot, is the fundamental unit of connection — plot matters the first time, but audiences return to hang out with characters they love.

The episode ends with a look at what's next: the YouTube series launches this summer, studio conversations for the feature film are underway in LA, and Gavin makes the point that the priority now isn't a money grab — the IP is already selling — but finding the right partners who respect and bring along the fandom that already exists.

Key Takeaways:

• Irish Fairy Door Company's international struggles taught Gavin a key lesson: a product built on cultural specificity needs to offer something universally resonant underneath, and Irishness alone isn't enough to drive global commercial scale.
• Rapid trend identification and small-bullet commercialisation is a replicable model: Innov8 Creative Academy's approach — spot a trend early, design fast, test at retail, scale only what sells — offers a very different risk profile to traditional IP development.
• Deddy Bears succeeded almost by accident, getting its Walmart listing by default when a more complex design proved undeliverable, but the 86% sell-through in season one validated the concept and opened up major global retail partnerships.
• The "creepy-cute" category is now mainstream, not alternative — Stranger Things, Wednesday Addams, and Five Nights at Freddy's have normalised it for family audiences, and there is clear commercial appetite that the kids media industry hasn't fully caught up with yet.
• Content doesn't always have to come first — Chris's argument is that in IP terms, content should sometimes support and amplify an existing fandom rather than being the thing that creates it. The audience for Deddy Bears existed before a single frame of animation was made.
• Character is the fundamental unit of connection, not plot. Audiences return to hang out with characters they love; plot is only new once. Both Gavin and Chris build from this principle outward.
• Listening to fandom before creating content is essential — Chris spent months observing the Deddy Bears audience before writing anything, recognising that those fans were there before him and that the content has to bring them along, not override them.
• Existing fandom is a golden ticket and a responsibility — the Deddy Bears Giphy page hitting 10 million shares weeks after launch (including front-page on April Fool's Day) is proof of concept, and both Gavin and Chris are focused on choosing partners who understand and respect the community that's already there.
• Traditional media has something to learn from the toy inventor's model — as producers take on more financial risk in a world with fewer broadcast partners willing to fund development, the ability to test cheaply, fail fast, and scale only proven concepts becomes increasingly relevant.
• The consumers want to hang out with their characters — Gavin's insight, crystallised by working with Chris, is that the emotional hook of a toy and the emotional hook of a TV character are essentially the same thing, and the two industries are more aligned than either has historically recognised.

Links referenced in this episode:

• InnovateCreativeAcademy
• TeddyBears
• DeaddyBears
• IrishFairyDoorCompany

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Innovate Creative Academy
• Teddy Bears
• Deaddy Bears
• Irish Fairy Door Company
• Kardashians
• Jam Media
• Stranger Things
• Disney
• Pokémon
• Five Nights at Freddy's
• Wednesday Addams
• Walmart
• Target
• Smiths
• 5 Below
• Amazon

With Emily otherwise occupied, this episode is a hosts' hangout — just Andy and Jo, with a car pickup deadline providing a natural time limit. The conversation covers three topics: the appointment of the BBC's new Director General, the news that YouTube kids show Danny Go has been picked up by Netflix, and some cautious optimism about original IP at the box office.

The BBC discussion centres on what the hiring of Matt Britton — who comes from a background in big tech and spent a significant stretch at Google — signals about the direction of travel for the corporation. Andy and Jo read it as a confirmation of the shift from a channel-first to a platform-first BBC, a move already evidenced by the recently announced partnership with YouTube, under which BBC Children's is launching seven new channels to reach younger, social-video-first audiences. The appointment of someone steeped in data, global distribution, and commercial scale feels deliberate. The hope is that Britton brings a more aggressive commercial mindset to BBC Studios — the revenue-generating arm that has historically played second fiddle to the UK public service operation — and that the BBC uses its considerable global brand equity before it erodes further. In an era of AI-generated content proliferation, trusted, quality brands matter more than ever, and the BBC's international reputation is still a real asset, particularly in the kids space.

The Danny Go segment is full of enthusiasm. The YouTube-native kids show — music-led, high energy, and genuinely well-produced in a way Jo compares to the Wiggles — has just been picked up by Netflix, and Andy argues it could give Ms. Rachel a run for her money once it lands on the platform. The broader point the conversation develops is about the YouTube-to-Netflix pipeline and what it now represents. YouTube functions as an incubation layer — a place where creators build audiences, make their mistakes, and prove their concept — before Netflix swoops in once the risk has been de-risked. Crucially, the exclusivity model that Netflix once insisted on seems to have softened: like Ms. Rachel, Danny Go is expected to remain on YouTube alongside its Netflix presence. Andy frames the Netflix pickup as something like peer review, or the moment an online-only brand gets stocked in a major department store — it confers credibility and marks a kind of graduation. The caveat is that Danny Go has been building since 2019, which leads to a broader point about fandom: you simply cannot speed run it. The Savannah Bananas are cited alongside Baller League as parallel examples of IPs that have taken seven or eight years of patient building before distribution deals and mainstream attention arrived.

The episode closes on a note of measured optimism about original IP. Hoppers for Pixar and Disney and Project Hail Mary both get name-checked as encouraging signs that audiences haven't entirely given up on new ideas — that the franchise-only approach, while understandable from a risk management perspective, isn't the only game in town. The hope is that commissioning budgets eventually follow the same signal.

Key Takeaways:

1. The BBC's appointment of a Director General from a big tech background signals a deliberate shift towards a platform-first, data-literate, globally-minded BBC — one that is more willing to treat distribution partnerships with the likes of YouTube as opportunity rather than threat.
2. BBC Studios and the BBC's global brand equity should be leveraged now, before that value erodes — the trust premium on quality, branded content is growing in an era of AI-generated content proliferation, and the BBC is well placed to capitalise on it internationally.
3. YouTube is functioning as Netflix's R&D department for kids content — Netflix is letting creators build and prove their audiences on YouTube, then acquiring those that break through, rather than taking the development risk itself.
4. The exclusivity model appears to have changed — both Ms. Rachel and Danny Go suggest Netflix is now comfortable with creators maintaining their YouTube presence alongside a Netflix deal, recognising that the audience was built there and can't simply be relocated.
5. A Netflix pickup now carries a credibility signal — landing on Netflix after building on YouTube functions like moving from a direct-to-consumer website into a major bricks-and-mortar retailer, conferring legitimacy and reach.
6. You cannot speed run fandom — Danny Go has been building since 2019, the Savannah Bananas since 2019, Baller League for over two years. The IPs that are now doing distribution deals have typically been at it for seven or eight years. Patient, consistent building is the pattern, not overnight success.
7. Original IP is showing signs of life at the box office — Project Hail Mary's strong hold into its second weekend, alongside Hoppers and K Pop Demon Hunters, suggests audience appetite for new stories hasn't been extinguished by the franchise era, even if the studio system hasn't fully caught up with that yet.
8. Commissioning investment into quality kids content remains under pressure, and the concern is that the YouTube-to-Netflix pipeline, while exciting, doesn't fully substitute for a healthy commissioning ecosystem that takes risks on original ideas from the outset.

This is a short, unplanned emergency episode — Andy, Jo, and Emily jumping on a three-way call in real time to react to a double dose of seismic industry news landing in the same day. First came the announcement that World Screen (and its TV Kids publication) would be ceasing to publish. Then, as the episode was being recorded, the news dropped that the Kids Screen Summit would not be returning in 2027, with parent company Brunico Communications confirming it is discontinuing its entire US events portfolio — Kids Screen, Realscreen, and NATPE among them. Jocelyn Christie, who has long been the face of Kids Screen, is also departing.

The trio don't dress it up. Kids Screen Summit has been, as the official announcement itself acknowledges, the heartbeat of the international kids content community for 30 years — the event that defined careers, brokered relationships, and gave the industry its annual gathering point. Its loss, coming alongside World Screen's closure, feels like more than a coincidence of bad timing.

The conversation quickly moves to the why. Andy notes that the most recent Kids Screen Summit was noticeably down on attendance, raising real questions about whether the numbers could ever add up again. Jo and Emily point to the structural shifts underneath: the kids media industry is under sustained pressure across funding, distribution, and monetisation, and the traditional event model — built around large corporate delegations from major broadcasters like Disney who could absorb the cost of sending whole departments — no longer reflects the reality of who is actually in the room. With fewer buyers, a more fragmented landscape, and individual attendees increasingly having to justify the expense themselves, the value proposition has fundamentally changed.

There's a broader point made about what these events were actually for, and whether that purpose still exists. Andy frames it neatly: these conferences were built around the gravitational pull of the big broadcasters, and when that gravitational force weakens, everything orbiting around it drifts. Emily raises the comparison with World Screen's TV Kids online summits, which have continued to attract strong speakers without requiring anyone to get on a plane — a model that perhaps points to where things are heading.

The episode ends on a note that's equal parts rueful and forward-looking, with Jo floating the idea that the Kids Media Club itself might have a role to play in filling some of the vacuum being left behind.

Key Takeaways:

1. Kids Screen Summit will not return in 2027, with Brunico Communications discontinuing its full US events portfolio — a significant moment for an event that has been central to the kids content industry for three decades.
2. World Screen and TV Kids have also ceased publishing, meaning the industry has lost two major institutional pillars in a single day.
3. Declining attendance was already a warning sign — the most recent Kids Screen was visibly down on numbers, raising questions about sustainability that have now been answered.
4. The traditional event model was built for a different industry — when major broadcasters could fund large corporate delegations, the economics worked. With fewer buyers and more individual attendees justifying costs themselves, the model has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
5. This is symptomatic of deeper industry-wide pressure — the loss of these events reflects the same structural stresses around funding, distribution, and monetisation that have been reshaping kids media more broadly.
6. The gravitational pull of the big broadcasters is weakening — and the conferences, markets, and publications that were built around that pull are feeling it acutely.
7. Online events may point to a more viable model — the TV Kids online summits are cited as an example of strong programming delivered without the barrier of travel costs and logistics.
8. A vacuum is forming, and the question of what — or who — fills it is now very much open.

This bonus episode takes a different format, with Emily reporting live from the Animation Dingle Festival in County Kerry, Ireland. Rather than a single guest, the episode brings together three separate conversations captured across the festival weekend: an interview with co-founder and festival director Maurice Galway, a chat with veteran screenwriter and director Karey Kirkpatrick, and a conversation with Ailbhe Fearon and Muireann Mulvihill, the two recent graduates who swept the festival's Animation Awards with their short film Anam.

Maurice sets the scene by explaining what makes Animation Dingle distinct from the industry's typical market-driven events. Now approaching its 15th year, the festival deliberately caps attendance at 750 and keeps its split exactly 50/50 between students and professionals — a structural choice that keeps the focus squarely on education and mentorship rather than deal-making. Maurice talks through several initiatives designed to lower the intimidation barrier for students, including the "Pitch and a Pint" session where students pitch directly to executives from broadcasters and streamers, a new confessional-style format for sharing ideas too wild or half-formed for a public pitch, and a "Tell Your Untold Story" stage coaching session. A theme Maurice returns to is the two-way nature of the inspiration: professionals arrive to give, and consistently leave having received something themselves from the energy and enthusiasm in the room.

Karey Kirkpatrick brings a sharp perspective on the state of the industry, drawing on a long career that includes work with Aardman and multiple original features. The central argument she makes is that the entertainment industry has become so risk-averse — particularly as studios answer to shareholders rather than creative leads — that the idea of a "sure thing" has taken over, even though it doesn't really exist. She uses K Pop Demon Hunters as a case study in how a genuinely original, unconventional idea can catch fire when it's given the right platform and timing, but notes that the same idea would likely have been passed over repeatedly in a pitch room. The conversation turns to what this means for emerging creators, and Karey's advice is clear and practical: don't wait to be discovered through a pitch, make things. Streamers in particular, she argues, are increasingly behaving like distribution platforms rather than development partners — meaning the work needs to demonstrate proof of concept before it reaches them, not after. Her summary advice to students is to build the craft fundamentals so that when a door opens, they can handle the pressure that comes with it.

The episode closes with Ailbhe Fearon and Muireann Mulvihill, whose Irish-language short Anam — meaning "soul" — won seven awards at the festival, including the overall Student Animation Award. The film, about an old man and a young boy on the Aran Island of Inis Oírr, grew out of a two-week research residency on the island and draws on the philosophy of John O'Donohue and the concept of the inner child. Their commitment to making the film in Irish — not translating an English script but constructing it in the language from the ground up, down to getting the specific Inis Oírr dialect right — gives the conversation a quietly profound dimension. They also share the story of reaching out to musician Brian McGlynn (of New Vagabond) after listening to his album on repeat throughout their residency, and his score going on to win its own award at the festival. Both are newly graduated and keen to stay in the Irish animation space.

Key Takeaways:

1. Animation Dingle is deliberately not a market — the 50/50 student-to-professional split and the cap of 750 attendees are design choices that protect the festival's educational culture and make it distinct from every other industry gathering.
2. Lowering the stakes unlocks participation — the confessional-style pitch format and the "Tell Your Untold Story" session are thoughtful responses to listening to what students actually need, recognising that not everyone thrives in a high-pressure public pitch environment.
3. Inspiration runs both ways — professionals who come to give frequently report leaving re-energised by students' creativity and enthusiasm, something Maurice says has become one of the festival's unexpected gifts.
4. There is no such thing as a sure thing in entertainment — Karey Kirkpatrick's core argument is that the attempt to science-ify creative risk is both futile and damaging, and that some of the industry's biggest successes (K Pop Demon Hunters, Anora) would have struggled to get made under current risk frameworks.
5. Fear is driving creative conservatism at the executive level — the pressure of reporting to shareholders rather than creative stakeholders means executives default to "defensible" choices over bold ones, which is hurting original IP across the board.
6. Streamers are becoming distributors, not developers — Karey's observation that streamers want work that's already beyond the idea phase, already executed with some competence, has significant implications for how emerging creators should be thinking about building their careers.
7. For students entering the industry: make things, build FOMO — the practical advice from Karey is to create a body of work that generates a sense of momentum and demand, rather than waiting for a pitch to land. Proof of engagement is now more valuable than a great pitch alone.
8. The Irish language is a storytelling asset, not just a box to tick — Ailbhe Fearon and Mulreann's insistence on making Anam in Irish rather than dubbing it, and their careful attention to Inis Oírr dialect, is held up as an example of authenticity that audiences and judges responded to strongly.
9. Animation in Ireland is in a strong moment — the quality of student work on show at Animation Dingle, and the international talent it attracts, reflects a wider sense that Irish animation is punching well above its weight as an industry.

In this episode, Andy, Jo, and Emily are joined by Ashley Mady, President of Zigazoo — a social media platform built specifically for kids that has been quietly growing its user base to over 10 million while the wider debate around children and social media has grown louder and louder. The timing feels right: with social media bans for under-16s being debated in legislatures around the world, Zigazoo makes the case that the answer isn't to shut kids out of online social spaces altogether, but to build better ones.

Ashley walks through what Zigazoo actually is and how it works. At its core, the platform is challenge-based — kids respond to video prompts by creating their own short-form content, and everything goes through moderation before it reaches the feed. The design philosophy is the inverse of most COPPA-compliant platforms, which tend to solve the safety problem by removing engagement entirely. Zigazoo keeps kids active and social, it just does so within guardrails built by educators rather than pure tech entrepreneurs. The founding team — husband and wife Zak and Leah — bring that dual lens of engineering and digital wellness to every product decision, and Ashley is clear that the mission is read aloud at every team meeting to keep it front and centre.

The moderation conversation is illuminating. Zigazoo started with round-the-clock human moderation but has since developed a hybrid "human in the loop" model where AI handles the initial filtering — including detecting whether a user is a child or adult and flagging inappropriate content — while humans remain part of the process. The addition of a comments feature, which was held back for years due to concerns about intent being lost in written text, was only made possible once AI became reliable enough to support it.

There's a lot of ground covered on what the platform has learned about kids' behaviour online. Notably, Zigazoo found that punishing bad content didn't work as well as rewarding good content — a shift from early notification-heavy approaches to a model that simply surfaces positive posts and lets the algorithm do the teaching. Kids who post well get featured; kids who don't get silence rather than a telling-off, and they adjust accordingly. The existing community of over 1,000 kid creators reinforces those norms organically, policing the platform's culture with a pride of ownership that Ashley describes as one of its most unexpected and valuable outcomes.

The platform's audience data is interesting in its own right. While Zigazoo launched as a preschool app, its core audience has aged with it — 9 to 12 year olds are now its most active creators, and some users who joined five years ago are still on the platform at 15. Rather than losing them to mainstream social media, Zigazoo has had to keep evolving to stay relevant, a challenge Ashley acknowledges openly and with some enthusiasm.

The brand and commercial side of the platform gets a thorough airing too. Over 100 brands — from Paramount and Amazon to toy companies, sports organisations, and publishers — use Zigazoo as a COPPA-compliant way to build genuine two-way community with kids. The platform vets all brand partners for mission alignment and manages their channels directly, which keeps the quality high but also means brands get something genuinely rare: verified, bot-free engagement with actual children. A wishlist feature that sends personalised emails to parents when a child saves a product is highlighted as a standout commercial innovation — formalising the influence kids have over family purchasing decisions in a way no other platform can currently match.

The episode closes on a broader cultural note. Ashley sees the current generation of kids as meaningfully different from their parents — more media literate, more aware of the downsides of social media, and more interested in positive online experiences. Jo echoes this from her own experience as a parent, noting a generational swing away from the open, unguarded approach their own generation took to early social media. The group agrees that banning kids from social media entirely risks pushing them towards unmoderated spaces via VPNs and hand-me-down phones, and that platforms like Zigazoo represent the more responsible path.

Key Takeaways:

1. Zigazoo makes the case for building better social media rather than banning it — the platform argues that keeping kids off social altogether drives them to less safe alternatives, and that the right response is purposefully designed, moderated spaces.
2. The challenge-based model is central to how it works — kids respond to video prompts with their own content, creating active participation rather than passive scrolling, while everything is moderated before reaching the feed.
3. Rewarding good behaviour outperforms punishing bad behaviour — early attempts to notify kids when content failed moderation created a negative experience. Surfacing good posts and letting poor ones disappear quietly proved far more effective at shaping behaviour.
4. AI-assisted "human in the loop" moderation has unlocked new features, including the comments section that was held back for years — a reminder that moderation technology, not just policy intent, sets the ceiling for what's safely possible on kids' platforms.
5. The platform's community polices itself — 1,000+ kid creators model positive behaviour, and when TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo users actively told newcomers that this was a different kind of space.
6. Age-gating within the platform recognises that under-16 isn't a monolith — the experience for a 6-year-old looks nothing like that for a 13-year-old, a distinction that blanket social media bans tend to collapse entirely.
7. Zigazoo has become a Gen Alpha trend intelligence platform — with 10 million users and polling features originally built for fun, the platform now has genuine insight into what kids are talking about, buying, and looking forward to, before those trends surface elsewhere.
8. The brand model is built on mission alignment and white-glove management — brands can't self-serve onto the platform, which keeps commercial activity COPPA-compliant and maintains trust with parents and kids alike.
9. The wishlist-to-parent email feature is a commercial innovation worth watching — it formalises child-to-parent purchase influence in a privacy-safe, opt-in way that no other platform currently offers.
10. Parent involvement is baked in from signup, which Ashley argues leads to longer platform lifecycles — a child whose parent has given informed consent is far less likely to be pulled off the platform than one who has found their way onto something their parents don't know about.

This bonus episode of the Kids Media Club sees Andy and Jo joined by Emily, who has just published her latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report — a deep dive into Netflix's engagement data covering the second half of 2025. It's a data-rich conversation that covers which shows are winning, which are declining, and what it all means for the wider kids content landscape.

The headline finding is that Paw Patrol has taken the number one spot by hours viewed in H2 2025, driven by its first-ever US Netflix window opening in July. It's a significant moment that underscores just how competitive the preschool segment has become — Gabby's Dollhouse held the top spot in H1, Ms. Rachel has climbed from sixth to fourth place, and Cocomelon, while still enormous, is showing signs of decline. The preschool race, as Emily puts it, is very much a ten or fifteen horse race.

Sesame Street's arrival on Netflix gets a thoughtful treatment. Launching with just four episodes, it performed modestly — and the group unpick why. Is it a volume problem? A brand perception issue, with audiences still associating the show firmly with PBS and YouTube rather than Netflix? Or simply that Sesame Street hasn't yet established a home on the platform? Emily is generous in her read of it, noting the brand's smart collaboration with YouTube creator Mark Rober as a savvy move to stay relevant — and Rober's own Netflix show, Crunch Lab, posted strong launch numbers.

That leads into a broader conversation about Netflix's creator economy strategy. The platform has been quietly building a pipeline of YouTube-native talent — Cocomelon, Little Angel, Blippi, Ms. Rachel, and now Mark Rober — and the data suggests the crossover approach is paying off in engagement terms. Jo raises the interesting point that Netflix appeared to step back from kids originals after disbanding its dedicated team, only to start commissioning original and exclusive content with creator talent again. The consensus is that Netflix never fully stepped away — it just got more selective, leaning into broader "family" content alongside its core kids slate.

SpongeBob emerges as one of the episode's most interesting talking points. Generating 143 million hours viewed on Netflix without a US window, Emily argues the Sponge is quietly having a moment that the industry isn't talking about loudly enough. She floats the prediction that SpongeBob could overtake Bluey as the top kids show in US streaming in 2026 — and notes what the strength of both SpongeBob and the Warner animation catalog (Teen Titans Go, The Amazing World of Gumball) could mean in the context of the Paramount-Warner merger.

The deeper theme running through the episode is the extraordinary durability of long-running IP. Paw Patrol at 15 years old, SpongeBob at 25, Peppa at 20 — these shows have entered a multigenerational pass-down mode where they remain fresh enough for new young audiences while carrying nostalgia value for older ones. For anyone trying to break through with a new show, that's the competitive reality they're up against.

The episode closes with a look at Gabby's Dollhouse's prospects for long-term franchise status, and a frank assessment of Cocomelon's decline — which Emily argues is structural rather than a failure of execution, given how narrowly age-targeted the IP is by design.

Key Takeaways:

1. Paw Patrol is Netflix's most-viewed kids show in H2 2025, powered by its US streaming debut — a clear illustration of how much a new territory window can move the needle on an established IP.
2. Preschool is the most competitive segment on Netflix, with Gabby's Dollhouse, Ms. Rachel, Paw Patrol, and Cocomelon all jostling for position. No single show dominates the full year.
3. Sesame Street's modest debut was likely a volume and perception problem — four episodes is thin for a brand of its stature, and audiences may not yet associate it with Netflix given its long history on PBS and YouTube.
4. Netflix's creator-to-streaming pipeline is working — shows like Ms. Rachel and Mark Rober's Crunch Lab demonstrate that YouTube-native talent can drive strong streaming engagement, and Netflix appears to be doubling down on that strategy with original commissions.
5. SpongeBob is underrated in the industry conversation — top animated comedy globally on Netflix without US distribution, and a genuine contender to be the number one kids streaming show in the US in 2026.
6. Long-running, multigenerational IP is the hardest thing to compete with — shows like SpongeBob, Peppa, and Paw Patrol are being passed down from parents who grew up with them, giving them a structural advantage that newer shows simply don't have yet.
7. Cocomelon's decline is structural, not a crisis — its very young target demographic limits its ability to build the multigenerational audience that sustains IP over the long term. Still huge; just not built to grow the way story-driven shows can.
8. Gabby's Dollhouse has genuine franchise longevity potential, particularly if the team can extend the live-action talent into formats that grow with the audience — something Emily sees as a clear opportunity.
9. The "family" designation matters more than it might seem — shows that appeal across age groups, from kids to parents, consistently deliver better engagement numbers and longer shelf lives than narrowly targeted content.

This is the second half of the Kids Media Club's conversation with Chris Heatherly, the former Disney executive who oversaw Club Penguin at its peak. The discussion picks up where part one left off, diving deep into online safety, the realities of moderating kids' platforms at scale, and where kids gaming is headed next.

Chris pulls no punches on the subject of child safety online. He walks through the specific tools Club Penguin used — heavy speech filtering, outright bans for serious offences, and a clever technique called "fake send," where borderline messages appeared to send but were never actually delivered to other users. The insight behind fake send is worth sitting with: when bad actors stopped getting a social reaction to their behaviour, they largely stopped bothering.

He's equally candid about the limits of any platform's ability to keep kids safe, and draws a sharp distinction between what he sees as genuine child protection efforts and a broader political movement using child safety rhetoric to push for internet regulation that would affect everyone. It's a provocative argument, and one that sparks a good back-and-forth with the hosts.

Roblox comes up repeatedly throughout the episode, with Chris offering a robust defence of the platform against what he considers unfair criticism. He points out that the most serious harm tends to happen off platform — predators use Roblox to make contact but drive kids elsewhere to avoid detection — and argues that Roblox's moderation efforts are more substantial than the headlines suggest. He also shares some remarkable behind-the-scenes stories from the Club Penguin era, including a DDoS attack during a Star Wars event that exposed Disney's complete lack of cyber protection, and a subsequent investigation that pointed to a potential hostile foreign actor using teenage hackers as cover.

The conversation then shifts to the state of kids gaming more broadly. Chris argues that the market effectively collapsed after COPPA-style regulation created an uneven playing field — legitimate kids platforms had to comply while others with large child audiences didn't bother — and that Roblox and Minecraft essentially rebuilt it from scratch. His framing of Roblox as "the new console" is a headline moment: he believes it represents a genuine architectural and business model shift away from the console and mobile era, not just another platform.

On the creator economy, Chris is optimistic. He sees AI as the tool that finally lowers the barrier to game creation enough that the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline becomes the norm for gaming too. He also flags that handing development over to creators brings its own risks — notably questionable monetisation mechanics — though he's sceptical of some of the more alarmist takes around loot boxes.

The episode closes with a strong point on parental involvement: platforms can't do it alone, and parents need to be treated as a distributed moderation force rather than passive bystanders.

Takeaways:

1. The Kids Media Club podcast is currently accepting sponsorship opportunities for interested parties.
2. Listeners can engage with the podcast via LinkedIn or the official website for strategic conversations.
3. Chris Heatherly, an influential figure at Disney, shared profound insights during our discussion on children's online safety.
4. The conversation surrounding online safety for children remains critical and unresolved after two decades.
5. The challenges faced by Club Penguin in moderating content are similar to those currently confronted by Roblox.
6. We believe that empowering parents to monitor their children's online activity is essential for ensuring their safety.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. kidsmediaclubpodcast.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Disney
2. Club Penguin
3. Roblox
4. Pinterest
5. Sago Sago
6. Takaboka

In this episode, Andy, Jo and Emily sit down with Chris Heatherly — former Disney executive, Club Penguin General Manager, and the man who ran the world's biggest kids' playground for nearly a decade. What follows is a candid, fascinating look at one of kids media's great "what ifs."

Chris traces his journey from overseeing Disney's toy business to becoming the custodian of Club Penguin, the safe, customisable multiplayer world that, at its peak, boasted 200 million registered avatars and 300,000 concurrent players. He talks about the early days of the platform, the innovative toy-to-game codes that predated today's digital unlocks, and how a fan-created myth about blurry in-game artwork spawned Card Jitsu — a trading card game that briefly outsold Pokémon at Toys R Us.

But the conversation goes deeper than nostalgia. Chris reflects honestly on why Club Penguin was ultimately shut down in 2017: a combination of the mobile transition (Club Penguin was built by artists who could code, not engineers), Disney's wider mismanagement of its games portfolio, and — perhaps most tellingly — corporate leadership that simply didn't understand the value of community. "I had suits ask me, 'what's the value of community?'" he recalls. It's a question that still stings, given what platforms built on exactly that principle are worth today.

There's also a moving thread running through the episode about what Club Penguin was really for. Chris describes a mission to protect children's innocence in a media landscape that's constantly pushing maturity down to younger audiences. He shares a quote from a focus group participant — a girl who said that at school she wasn't the most popular, but on Club Penguin she could be whoever she wanted — that became the team's north star. That ethos extended to the platform's charity work too, with millions donated through the Coins for Change initiative, and an unusually rigorous commitment to making sure the money actually made an impact.

Club Penguin may be gone, but as Chris points out, pirate servers running the game today have more active players than ever played during its official peak — and a new generation of lore has grown up entirely after his time. The nostalgia is real, and it's earned.

Key Takeaways

1. Community is a product feature, not a side effect. Club Penguin's lasting cultural impact came from genuine human connection — moderators who replied to kids' emails, a team that listened to its audience, and leadership that treated the playground metaphor seriously. Platforms that stripped out those elements to cut costs never managed to replicate the magic.
2. Artists who code build differently than engineers who design. Club Penguin's charm came from its creative-led origins. The comparison with Disney Infinity — a technology-first project — is instructive: one is still talked about with affection; the other isn't.
3. User-generated culture is powerful, and ignoring it is expensive. Card Jitsu, one of Club Penguin's biggest hits, came directly from fan speculation. Disney's corporate structure struggled to understand how a platform could generate its own IP from the ground up — a lesson that Roblox and Minecraft would later prove at enormous scale.
4. Corporate short-termism kills long-term value. The decision to shut down Club Penguin is presented here as one of the clearest examples of a business prioritising spreadsheet logic over strategic vision. Chris left Disney partly because he refused to be the one to close it.
5. Protecting children's innocence is a genuine editorial position — and a commercially sound one. The longevity of Club Penguin's cultural footprint suggests that audiences — and their parents — are hungry for platforms that hold that line.
6. Part two of this conversation continues next week.

This episode brings Andy, Jo, and Emily back together after a busy fortnight that saw the Kids Media Club divide and conquer — Emily and Andy heading to KidScreen in San Diego while Jo hosted the Kids and Teens Summit at MIP London. Here's what they came away with.

The hierarchy is gone — and that's now official. Both events reflected something the podcast has been saying for a while: TV no longer sits at the top of the kids media food chain. YouTube, Roblox, and broadcast were all on equal footing — on the panels, and in the rooms. That shift from polite tolerance of digital platforms to genuine integration feels like a genuine turning point.

KidScreen got intentional about YouTube and Roblox. Rather than token sessions, this year's programming offered real depth — from 101-level introductions to developer showcases — signalling that the industry has accepted these platforms as core infrastructure for young audiences, not add-ons.

Jonathan Haidt's keynote caused friction. The Anxious Generation author's appearance divided the room, given that the very conference schedule celebrated platforms he believes are harmful to children. It made for an interesting tension — and a useful reminder that the debate around kids, screens, and wellbeing is far from settled.

Social media bans: well-intentioned, but complicated. The team unpacks the nuance that came out of both events and the Children's Media Foundation day. Outright bans may actually let platforms off the hook. The COPPA regulations are held up as a cautionary tale — well-intentioned legislation that may have done unintended damage to the kids content ecosystem, with YouTube monetisation for children's content reduced to around 30% of what it once was.

Kids media is facing a potential market failure. TV commissions for children's content were down 20% in 2025 — more than double the decline seen in other genres. Combined with reduced YouTube monetisation, the financial incentive to make content specifically for kids is shrinking. Some producers are already quietly dropping the word "kids" from how they describe themselves — something the team finds genuinely alarming.

Roblox is getting ahead of the crosshairs. Andrew Bareza from Twin Atlas (the studio behind Creatures of Sonaria and various Lego activations) addressed safety concerns directly and clearly at MIP London — walking through the toolsets Roblox is rolling out and demonstrating how brand-safe, purposeful activation on the platform is very much possible.

The BBC and YouTube partnership: a front door, not a full commitment. Jo hosted the BBC and YouTube in a fireside that got unexpectedly candid. The BBC's suite of seven YouTube channels won't simply mirror their broadcast output — the strategy is promos, tactical full episodes around new series launches, and some YouTube-first commissions (including a Next Step micro-drama). The goal is to use YouTube as a gateway to iPlayer, though whether a generation raised on YouTube will follow that path remains an open question.

The Sidemen are rewriting the rules on appointment viewing. Long-form content, licensed TV formats (a Family Fortunes rework pulled from Fremantle's archive got 3 million views in 24 hours), and a focus on watch time over view counts — the Sidemen's keynote at MIP London was a masterclass in how creators are evolving into something closer to TV studios, and why that matters for the future of format licensing.

Despite a lot of hard truths, both events left the team with a clear impression: the people still in the room are passionate, pragmatic, and not going anywhere without a fight.

Episode Summary:

In this bonus episode, Andy Williams and Emily Horgan join Eric Calderon of Surviving Animation for a candid debrief straight from the Kids Screen conference floor in San Diego. With a smaller-than-usual attendance, a shifting industry landscape, and more than a few big questions hanging in the air, the three take stock of what Kids Screen looks like now — and what it might need to become.

Key Takeaways:

1. Smaller crowd, better conversations. Attendee numbers were down, but the quality of conversations was up. The frantic "hard sell" energy of previous years gave way to something more honest — people asking each other how they're really doing and what they're trying next.

2. The old guard model is done. The days of "what does Netflix want?" panels are over. This year's conversation centred on anime, K-pop, webtoons, Roblox, and YouTube — and crucially, the buyers in the audience were the ones taking notes.

3. The audience is there. The business model isn't. Platforms like YouTube and Roblox have the kids. Nobody has quite figured out how to build a sustainable revenue model around them yet — and the group are refreshingly honest that no one left San Diego with the answer.

4. Jonathan Haidt stirred the room. The keynote took a hard line against social media and called out Roblox and micro-drama sessions directly. The reaction was mixed — some applauded, some walked out. The group discuss whether a blanket ban approach is too blunt, and make the case for a more graduated, age-appropriate ladder of access instead.

5. Kids Screen itself is at a crossroads. With attendance below a thousand and a move back to Miami on the horizon, the conference is grappling with an identity question: if the traditional buyer-seller marketplace no longer functions the way it used to, what is the event actually for? The group land on a compelling answer — relationship deposits. You're not closing deals, you're laying groundwork.

6. Do the thing, don't just attend the session. Sitting in on a YouTube strategy panel no longer counts as a YouTube strategy. The studios generating the most excitement were the ones actually experimenting on new platforms — making mistakes, learning fast, and trying again.

7. Humility is the new competitive advantage. Whether you're a veteran studio or an independent creator, approaching new platforms with curiosity rather than authority is what separates those who are adapting from those who aren't.

The mood heading into 2026? Cautiously determined. As Eric puts it: stop surviving, find the fix.

Let me know if you'd like to adjust the tone, length, or structure of any section.

In this special live episode, recorded at KidsScreen in San Diego, Andy and Emily take to the stage to moderate a deep-dive panel on one of the most talked-about new preschool IPs in the market right now: BeddyByes.

Born out of the very relatable chaos of lockdown-era bedtimes, BeddyByes is a new show from Jam Media designed to help young children wind down — and it's been built with real intention, from the ground up. Joining Andy and Emily are John Rice, CEO of Jam Media and co-creator of the show; Richard Goldsmith, EVP of Kids and Family at Blue Ant Media, who handles worldwide distribution; and Vienna Downs, also from Blue Ant, leading consumer products and licensing.

Together, they walk through the full journey of bringing BeddyByes to market — from the initial creative spark and the challenge of pitching a "bedtime show" to broadcasters, to landing deals with the BBC, RTE, Disney Junior, and Moose Toys. The panel covers the deliberate, step-by-step distribution strategy, what it really takes to build authentic consumer products around a new IP, and why owning a clear niche might just be the smartest move a brand can make right now.

It's an honest, energetic conversation about what it looks like to build a franchise the right way — with great content at the centre and the right partners around the table.

This week the Kids Media Club team is back for another Host’s hangout - Andy returns from a ski holiday (not in a cast, luckily) — and he's joined by co-hosts Jo and Emily for a wide-ranging house chat covering some of the biggest stories shaping kids media right now.

The conversation kicks off with something that still surprises people even when they hear the numbers: YouTube has just had its biggest year for ad revenue ever, pulling in $40 billion. Add in the YouTube TV subscription tier — now revealed for the first time in Google's earnings — and the total climbs to $60 billion, making YouTube the second largest TV subscription service in the US.

The team unpacks what this means for how we think about YouTube. It's not the disruptive upstart anymore. It's building tailored content packages — including a kids-specific bundle featuring Nickelodeon, Disney Channel and PBS — and increasingly talking and behaving like a traditional broadcaster. Sound familiar? That's roughly the same trajectory Netflix took, and we all know where Netflix ended up.

Closely related to all of this is the BBC's recently announced partnership with YouTube, bringing seven new BBC kids channels to the platform.

The group agrees it's genuinely mutual. YouTube gets the credibility boost of having the world's foremost public service broadcaster as an official partner — no small thing at a moment when social media platforms are under intense regulatory scrutiny. The BBC, meanwhile, gets reach (especially globally, where those three letters carry less weight with younger generations than they once did) and access to YouTube's expertise in creator-led content — an area where the BBC openly acknowledges a skills gap. The Creator Lab initiative and the ongoing Last Pundit Standing project are all part of that upskilling effort.

Recording on Safer Internet Day (10 February), the team touches on the fast-moving world of platform regulation. Australia — first mover on age restrictions for under-16s on social media — has now requested an urgent meeting with Roblox over child safety concerns, potentially bringing Roblox into the same regulatory frame as other social platforms in France and the UK.

Rather than viewing this purely as threat, the group notes that Roblox, Discord and others are actually accelerating their own age verification and safety rollouts in response. The pressure may be producing faster, better tech than the platforms would have developed on their own timetable. Whether it's enough to get them out of the regulatory crosshairs is another question.

This sparks a broader thought: could regulatory pressure push more platforms towards subscription models, where identity verification is structurally easier to enforce?

From there the conversation takes a wonderfully nostalgic detour into Club Penguin — the beloved, chaotic, genuinely safe online world for kids that Disney acquired and then, the team argues, fundamentally misunderstood.

The diagnosis? Disney saw Club Penguin as a promotional platform rather than as an IP or community in its own right. They didn't invest in a proper mobile transition at the critical moment. And crucially, they couldn't see its long-term potential because they were busy counting Frozen and Star Wars money. The comparison that lands hardest: Club Penguin could have been Roblox. Disney is now investing heavily in Fortnite as its digital parks equivalent — the very thing Club Penguin might have become with patience and strategic vision.

This leads into a broader discussion of Disney's new CEO Josh D'Amaro, the question of whether Disney has a genuine new IP problem (spoiler: the group thinks yes), and what the Eisner era did differently that allowed creative hits to flow consistently. The emerging consensus: Disney Plus could be the incubator for new franchise IP, but only if it's protected from the weight of impossible commercial expectations from day one.

The episode rounds out with two Super Bowl ad appearances from kids IP giants — Pokémon celebrating its 30th birthday and the trailer for Minions and Monsters — prompting a conversation about what it actually takes to justify an $8 million, 30-second media slot. The answer? Roughly 15–20 years of patient capital and multi-generational brand building.

Jo and Andy also flag an upcoming panel at KidsScreen exploring exactly this question — how early-stage franchises like Betty Buys from Jam Media begin the long journey towards that kind of brand scale.

Find Kids Media Club on all major podcast platforms, YouTube, and Substack.

Tags: kids media, YouTube TV, BBC YouTube partnership, children's content, Club Penguin, Disney IP, Roblox, child online safety, age verification, Safer Internet Day, Pokemon, Minions, kids franchise building, public service broadcasting, MIP London, KidsScreen

This week the Kids Media Club welcomes Sarah DeWitt, SVP and GM of PBS Kids, for a conversation that covers a lot of ground — and covers it brilliantly.

For international listeners, Sarah begins by unpacking how PBS actually works: a network of 330 member stations across the US, locally run but nationally coordinated, funded through a mix of voluntary public donations, corporate underwriting (with strict nutrition and advertising rules), and federal grants. It's a model unlike anything in the UK or Ireland, and understanding it makes what comes next all the more striking.

Sarah explains the two major federal funding cuts that have hit PBS Kids hard — the dissolution of the Corporation for Public Broadcasting and the abrupt termination of the Department of Education's Ready to Learn grant, a $100 million, five-year programme that has quietly underpinned some of PBS Kids' most beloved shows. Super Why, Odd Squad, and the brand new Phoebe and J all owe their existence, in part, to shifting presidential education priorities channelled through that grant. With it gone almost overnight, PBS Kids has cut close to 30% of its content staff and is now looking at halving its development pipeline by 2028 and 2029.

But the conversation is far from doom and gloom. Sarah talks about the extraordinary public response — kids running lemonade stands and sending in their pocket money — and shares that 82% of US voters, including 72% of Trump voters, say they value PBS for its children's content. She's also busy exploring new territory: philanthropic foundations, commercial licensing, and international co-production opportunities that PBS had never needed to pursue before.

There's also a rich discussion about what public service media can do that commercial broadcasters simply won't — from Carl the Collector, a show with a lead character on the autism spectrum that sparked a seven-year-old to ask his parents if he was autistic, to the challenge of creating developmentally appropriate short-form content that pushes back against the addictive mechanics now baked into so much of kids' media.

It's one of those episodes where the hosts keep trying to get back on track and keep getting beautifully derailed — and you won't mind one bit.