ABSTRACT
New platforms and services for children’s television and video have seen children in many countries abandon linear television for online viewing. These services challenge existing definitions of children’s television along with ways of understanding the production and distribution of children’s screen content. Children are a valuable audience for global streaming services, including YouTube, Netflix, and Disney+. All operate however outside local regulatory parameters, offering children in multiple territories abundant international content but undertaking little local investment. As such, the popularity of these services poses an existential threat to national public service media. Their popularity also disrupts efforts both to protect children from inappropriate material and to ensure they have access to high-quality, locally produced content that situates them in their national cultural context. This chapter offers an analysis of developing business models and regulatory regimes for children’s screen industries and the efforts of public service media to adapt accordingly. It explains the extraordinary challenges current disruptions pose to long-standing funding norms for children’s screen content and how their effects were exacerbated by COVID-19. As an increasingly elusive and unpredictable child audience fragments across multiple platforms, certain continuities remain, nonetheless. These include inequality of digital access, the societal need to protect the vulnerable child, and the battle for children’s attention between highly commercialized global media brands and underfunded public service broadcasters. Children’s television provides a useful lens through which to consider broader transformations in media industries in the on-demand age.
