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The Kids Aren’t All Right

10 Jun, 2013 By: Stephanie Prange

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One of the backbones of the sellthrough business has always been the kidvid genre. Kids will watch the same content over and over again, and buying a title is a good investment if they plan to watch it 20, 30, 100 … however many times. Kids like what they like, and they are obsessive about it.

More recently kids are having an effect on the subscription video-on-demand business as well. It seems there are subscribers who use services such as Netflix and Amazon Prime to access stuff for the kids. As I am writing this, I’m at swim practice for my 11-year-old. If I had a toddler with me, I can imagine accessing Netflix or some other subscription service to entertain him or her for the 45-minute lesson. Obviously, TV episodes would fit the bill. Perhaps I had been accessing “Blue’s Clues” for months during these lessons via my Netflix account, and suddenly “Blue’s Clues” (owned by Viacom) isn’t available. The horror! The tantrums!

That’s the consumer experience of what is happening in the SVOD universe. Now, thanks to a $200 million deal between Amazon and Viacom, subscribers who want “Blue’s Clues” have to turn to Amazon instead of Netflix.

Ted Sarandos, the savvy chief content officer at Netflix, downplayed the loss of Viacom kids content, saying kids’ TV has a short shelf life. That may be true. I certainly didn’t watch “Blue’s Clues” as a child, and my kids have no emotional attachment to most of what I grew up watching. (That doesn’t include “Scooby-Doo,” which seems to be timeless. Go figure.) But if you’ve ever had a kid who could be calmed by nothing but “Dora the Explorer,” the lasting value of the show is sort of beside the point.

This, I think, is where a scheme such as UltraViolet shows its value. Via the content locker, a family can simply buy exactly the content the kids like, without having to worry whether Netflix or Amazon sign with a particular content owner. This is UltraViolet’s advantage. Ultimately, consumers want easy access to the content they like, not to the content a particular subscription service is willing to pay for. That goes for the adults, as well as the kids.

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