“In 2007, I watched ‘The X-Information’ on YouTube. It modified my consumption expertise!” mentioned Olivia Deane, analysis supervisor at analytics agency Ampere Evaluation, who was invited to debate the previous 20 years on the opening session of MipJunior on October 18. 2016 viewers shifts, restructuring of youngsters’s content material and new enterprise fashions.
From the on-demand increase to peak and post-peak TV, youngsters’s content material creators have been on a rollercoaster trip over the previous 20 years, as Dean defined in his speak “Charting a brand new period of youngsters’s tv and leisure” on the JW Marriott in Cannes Lodge Grand Theater.
First the excellent news. Dean defines the interval from 2004 to 2014 as “the primary period of on-demand,” the place “youngsters had the flexibility to entry media at any time and have been extra more likely to have a number of TV-connected gadgets than households with out one,” famous consultants.
To accommodate this development and surge in demand, “streaming firms acquired loads of youngsters’ content material and put a reimbursement into the child’s fee market,” Dean mentioned of the years from 2014 to the current, which she describes as Known as the “OTT Golden Years and Peak Interval”.
Because the 2021 knowledge reveals, youngsters’s content material is shortly turning into a precedence for commissioners, and amongst different genres, youngsters’s and household content material ranks third in streaming purchases, behind documentaries and actuality TV ( 18,000, 25,000 and 23,000 respectively), rating fifth globally in VOD commissions (294) after documentaries (797), actuality (639), comedy (509) and crime/thriller (450).
The push for kids’s content material commissions virtually doubled between 2020 and 2022 (from 293 titles within the first six months of 2020 to 448 titles in the identical interval in 2022), finally resulting in market saturation. “Within the second quarter of 2024, there will probably be 43 years of youngsters’s motion pictures accessible on streaming and broadcast platforms…not counting sleep!” Dean emphasised.
Then a brand new actuality hits. Whereas the streaming buyer base will enhance in 2024 with the introduction of advert tiers, OTT income technology unit (RGU) progress, which has been rising steadily since 2015, is anticipated to achieve a maturity level within the coming years and The online enhance will probably be decrease by 2026 than a decade in the past, Ampere mentioned.
Then got here commissions, which suffered what Deane referred to as an unprecedented downturn: 5,079 to eight,090 books ordered in 2020-2021 (up 59%), 9,843 in 2022 (up 22% year-over-year), 2023 The annual quantity fell by 12% to eight,706 and can enhance by an extra 5% to eight,291 in 2024.
Ampere mentioned youngsters’s and household programming and actuality TV have been essentially the most affected, down 13% within the first half of 2024 in contrast with the identical interval final yr. Quite the opposite, dramas grew by 3% and documentaries by 4% throughout the identical interval.
Contemplating the scenario after the height of youngsters’s TV consumption, Dean mentioned: “In the present day’s youngsters need to have the ability to watch what they need to watch after they need to watch it. Citing Netflix’s consumption patterns, the analyst mentioned that youngsters’s and household motion pictures would be the hottest in 2023. The second hottest style within the second half of the yr, behind crime and thrillers and forward of comedy and romance.
“Which means that youngsters do play an essential position in subscription habits, regardless that youngsters are usually not driving the expansion of streaming subscriptions. [unlike sport]they actually assist scale back churn,” Dean noticed.
In consequence, “streamers are nonetheless shopping for loads of youngsters content material regardless that they are not funding loads of new commissions,” she continued, noting that commissions from Netflix fell 42% and commissions from Netflix fell 58%. From 2024 to the primary half of 2024, acquisitions from Apple elevated by 7%, acquisitions from Netflix elevated by 7% throughout the identical interval, and acquisitions from Apple elevated by 16%.
The excellent news for impartial producers is that whereas the kids’s content material market stays extremely saturated, public broadcasters proceed to speculate closely, albeit with a concentrate on present well-liked content material (in 2020, PBS TV renewals rose from 38% steadily grew to 59%).
Deane cited the success tales of French online game and animation studio Ankama, which used launch occasions to advertise the relaunch of its IP “Wakfu,” in addition to the YouTube sensation “Lukas the Spider”: “For the flexibility to Creators who discover different methods to fund their initiatives, and who can discover methods to associate with well-liked manufacturers or mental property, may have a aggressive benefit within the busy acquisitions market.
MipJunior will probably be held in Cannes from October 18th to twentieth.
