Last year, YouTube launched a child-focused app called YouTube Kids. Kids-safe video apps are nothing new, but when the world’s largest public video platform gets into it, it makes a lot of difference.
Google has been slowly trying to build niches within its massive streaming video community, platforms like YouTube Red for paid subscriptions to original and premium programming, YouTube Kids, Live streaming, Sports and lots more.
YouTube Kids is now going to expand into Malaysia and the Philippines after launching in 21 countries. Expanding to a new region wouldn’t normally make the news, but YouTube has tied up with Malaysia’s Animonsta Studios to run BoBoiBoy, a popular series that will now be pushed to the YouTube Kids app in these two regions.
“We hope YouTube Kids will be the perfect platform to stage our content and creativity directly to our audience. As YouTube Kids is an application, we want this to be the right playground for kids, and at the same time motivate content developers to produce more kid-friendly content” – Animonsta Studios
There is also some leveraging activity going on in the background. Niche apps like YouTube Kids are now partnering with the parent platform to provide linked services. A YouTube Red membership now gives parents in the U.S., Australia and New Zealand the ability to sign into the YouTube Kids app as part of the subscription.
But even the standalone app is a unique creation because videos are pre-screened by YouTube to make sure they are, in fact, kids-friendly, making the job of parents a lot easier because they no longer have to worry about the content their kids are consuming.
YouTube is not the first to do this, of course. Over the past two years Netflix has created more than two dozen original series for kids. And earlier this year they started targeting a forgotten demographic – families. Amazon has been going after this niche for more than two years, lining up licensing rights for popular shows such as Dora the Explorer and SpongeBob SquarePants, and acquiring top talent for Amazon Studios.
Video streaming services have to keep thinking out of the box to keep users coming back again and again. Unlike TV, where you’re pretty much locked in to the same provider year after year with a choice of channel subscriptions, video streaming users can easily switch to another service if they’re not happy with the quality of programming. Apart from satisfying the video cravings of adults, they now have to cater to kids and families as a whole.
Far from being a new trend, this is actually video streaming going back to the roots of television, where every program was family-friendly because the TV was the center of the household. Dinner times inevitably coincided with prime time programming, and families would huddle around the dinner table watching their favorite shows on their brand new black and white TVs.
I don’t think we’ll be going back to those times because today, there are multiple devices in every home and on-demand video is growing in volume. The ‘huddle around the old box’ phenomenon might be dead, but we will see a large-scale reappearance of niches such as child-friendly and family-friendly programming. What worked for TV is inevitably going to make its way into this new mode of audio-visual entertainment. And it’s already started.
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