In Tots' TV Shows, A Booming Market, Toys Get Top Billing

[SOURCE: Wall Street Journal, AUTHOR: Aaron O. Patrick aaron.patrick@wsj.com]
As the age of TV viewers gets younger and younger, television networks are scrambling to compete for the very smallest eyeballs. And because profits in this market are driven largely by merchandising, the commercial and creative sides of children's television are fusing in a way that sometimes makes them indistinguishable from one another. The United Kingdom has long been a test bed for children's television, throwing out new ideas that are followed elsewhere. In the 1950s, it introduced the notion of educational TV. Before becoming a world-wide hit, the "Teletubbies" was launched in the late 1990s on the British Broadcasting Corp. The show is credited with lowering the age of TV audiences to below 3 years, which was the previous benchmark. Today, some of the most popular preschool shows in the U.S. are British, including "Bob the Builder" and "Thomas and Friends." TV networks are chasing preschoolers because unlike older kids, they haven't abandoned TV for the Internet or video games. They're also at home a lot. Britain counts more than 20 channels dedicated to television for kids, more than it has for sports. In 2005, British TV showed 10 times as many hours of children's programming -- 160,441 in total -- as a decade earlier, according to the Television Research Partnership Ltd., a U.K. research firm. Programming for preschoolers is mixed in with that for older children. In the U.S., preschoolers have their own channels. They include Viacom Inc.'s seven-year-old Noggin and PBS Kids Sprout, a channel launched last year by Comcast Corp., Sesame Workshop and the Public Broadcasting System. Unlike shows for older viewers, TV programs for small kids can't rely on advertising revenue because commercials aimed at the very young rarely work. As a result, networks pay low fees to studios. Shows for tots are also relatively expensive to make. So producers turn to sales of toys and DVDs to make up the difference. A 3-year-old is unlikely to see a 30-second ad and request the toy, but parents will often buy their kids toys based on favorite shows.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113831741855157559.html?mod=todays_us_pa...
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