The kids are content

The folks at Nickelodeon are quick with the numbers. According to them, this kids’ channel from the Viacom18 stable has seen an astounding growth of 112 per cent over the past year. This acceleration has resulted in the channel being bumped up to the #3 position in the kids’ television category, after Pogo and Cartoon Network. Pogo has apparently seen a whopping 34 per cent loss of market share, and Cartoon Network has bid adieu to 3 per cent of its share. Hungama TV still remains the largest player in the kids’ entertainment category, but has grown only 34 per cent in the last 12 months.

Now those are indeed numbers to tom-tom. Nickelodeon arrived on India’s TV guides only in 1999, but it’s been a nice ride since for this channel that believes it has figured out the right kids’ programming formula. “GeraldineLaybourne (President of Nickelodeon till 1996) came to the helm in the mid-80s and said, why don’t we ask kids what they want, as opposed to just making what we think they want? That was really the grounding of Nickelodeon,” says Steve Grieder, Senior Vice President, Nickelodeon International, on a recent visit to India.

Globally, as in India, the bulk of the channel’s audience comes from the 6-10 age bracket, and although the channel is aware of a significantly large amount of adult coviewership, it is very consciously a kids-only channel. Grieder explains that apart from the fact Nickelodeon invented children’s television to begin with, the key distinction is the kind of content the channel produces. “Nickelodeon is a channel and brand that serves kids in every sense of the word. Cartoon Network has been wrestling with this issue ever since they’ve been around; they’re wrestling with whether they serve kids or animation aficionados.” At Nickelodeon they don’t struggle with all those existential questions at all, but as a philosophy, serve allthe genres that a kid would like to watch on television. The company identifies and measures this by putting a lot of research into the behaviour and lifestyle patterns of their core audience. Nickelodeon’s focus is on what is relevant content for the audience and that question gets answered differently in different markets. In India, however, it may still not be time for specific ‘made-in-India’ content.

What Nickelodeon is doing is syndicating content to regional channels in the country. Example: The wildly popular Dora the Explorer has been licensed to Chutti TV, a kids’ channel from the Sun TV network. As Grieder says: “That formula seems to work for us. Where we hang our hat is in content.”

— Deepti Khanna Bose