Programs/Content

PBS mulls strategy to boost kids’ ratings

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With many local pubcasters reporting sharp declines in daytime viewership, PBS programmers are reevaluating scheduling strategies for children’s programs, trying to get a handle on a problem that’s also affecting commercial competitors for kids TV audiences.

Programs/Content

Odd Squad to be PBS Kids’ newest math learning series

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It’s a question that parents and teachers struggle to answer at home and in the classroom: how do we make math fun for kids? The creative minds at PBS Kids have spent the last few years devising a solution to that problem. With Ready to Learn funding provided through the Department of Education in 2010, PBS staff set their sights on creating two math-focused children’s shows. Their answer for the 3- to 5-year-old crowd was PEG + CAT, an animated series that debuted last fall.  Produced by Fred Rogers Company, PEG + CAT teaches measurement, shapes and patterns, skills that help the characters solve their real-life problems.

Odd Squad, a live-action math series geared toward children ages 5 to 8, is the latest addition to PBS’s slate of math-based kids’ programming.

Programs/Content

Output: Bitton’s homage to Piaf, STEM rock tunes from PBS, where 5-year-olds hide evidence (on PRX), and more

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Decades ago, a teenaged Raquel Bitton locked herself in her San Francisco bedroom, suffering miserably from her first broken heart. Her only comfort was an album by Edith Piaf, the diminutive French chanteuse known as “the Little Sparrow.”

“It is the love that you love,” Piaf sang in “C’est L’amour.” “It is love that makes you dream. It is love that wants love. It is love that makes us cry.”

“I listened to it all and came out of my room with a decision to get onstage and sing — and to love again,” Bitton said. “I put together a little revue singing Piaf’s songs, telling pieces of her stories.

Development

PubTV tests new approaches for fundraising with kids’ TV

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This reluctance to fundraise around children’s shows is “a conundrum,” Rotenberg said in an interview. “Kids’ programming is probably the most recognized and valued service that we offer … And yet it seems that, as a community, we shy away from it.”

Programs/Content

Fred Rogers goes viral with “Garden of Your Mind” video remix

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An Auto-Tuned video of the late PBS icon Fred Rogers is going viral, with more than 700,000 views as of Friday (June 8) afternoon. The three-minute video was remixed by Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for PBS Digital Studios. “When we discovered video mash-up artist John D. Boswell, aka melodysheep, on YouTube,” the PBS studio said in a statement, “we immediately wanted to work together. Turns out that he is a huge Mister Rogers Neighborhood fan, and was thrilled at the chance to pay tribute to one of our heroes.” It’s the first in a series of PBS icon remixes.

CPB

Preschoolers get 40-plus (count ’em!) new PBS Kids math games

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PBS Kids unveiled last week its largest offering of math-skill games for preschoolers — a cache of 40 games that can be played on computers, mobile devices and interactive whiteboards. “As the nation’s children continue to fall behind, we need to embrace new technology to help them learn,” said Lesli Rotenberg, PBS’s senior v.p., children’s media. Games include Monkey Jump from Curious George, which has kids hop along with George and count as they fill a toy-store bin with bouncing balls; Hermit Shell Crab Game from The Cat in the Hat Knows a Lot About That!, in which players help the Cat, Nick and Sally fit hermit crabs into shells of corresponding sizes and patterns; and Carnival Count-off from Fizzy’s Lunch Lab, which teaches children how to estimate added sums and count by fives and tens. PBS partnered with CPB on the project, which is supported by a U.S. Department of Education Ready to Learn grant.

Programs/Content

Many stations packaging their own kids’ channels

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With the all-digital future arriving, if haltingly, and a bigger share of viewers likely to come through DTV multicast channels, public TV stations are reconsidering how to use their bitstream, making over their channels, and in some cases adding new services to woo audiences. The wee audience, for one. Little kids and their parents are a vital audience and constituency for public TV, and mockups of the stations’ future DTV menu often featured a dedicated channel for them. To supply it, stations had access to a 24-hour PBS Kids feed, packaged by PBS. That changed in 2005 when the network acceded to the desires of its two biggest producers for children and joined a partnership to package Sprout, a cable channel for preschoolers.

Programs/Content

Here I am, your special PBS Kids Island (come to me, come to me)

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PBS Kids Island, an online amusement park located on the Raising Readers website (www.readytolearnreading.org), offers learning games created by producers of Super Why!, Word World, Sesame Street and Between the Lions, most collected from their separate sites, grouped by reading skill and divided into three levels of difficulty. On the cartoony Island, kids can choose games to play from a carousel ride and win tickets they can use to buy things from the prize booth — video downloads, printable games and coloring sheets. In their own tree house, a kid can stash or play with their prizes and display their awards. Project advisors who work with low-scoring schools eligible for federal Title 1 aid encouraged PBS to give kids the opportunity to choose activities on their own on the Island, because low-income kids don’t get to make many choices or take risks or try experiments, says Sharon Philippart, project director for Raising Readers at PBS. Parents, teachers or caregivers sign up their kids and can monitor their progress through the levels.

Programs/Content

Kids’ pipeline

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Debut this fall [2007]
Jim Knox’s Wild Zoofari
Producing organizations: Jim Knox’s Wild Zoofari LLC. Producer: Rob Child. Creators: Rob Child, Jim Knox, Bruce Knox. Episodes: 14/30. Status: released on DVD 2006.

Programs/Content

PBS Kids Go! channel: plan is no-go for now

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After fewer than half of PBS stations made commitments to carry a proposed multicast channel for school-aged children, the network pulled back its plan to launch PBS Kids Go! as a fully packaged DTV multicasting service in October. The network is instead exploring its options to distribute school-age fare via video-on-demand or broadband platforms.

“I don’t want to bring up a service and not have the resources to support it,” said PBS President Paula Kerger, who announced the decision to stations July 6 [2006]. Only one-third of public TV licensees expressed interest in paying for Go! as an a la carte service, while PBS needed buy-in from least half, she said.

Programs/Content

A cuddly sloth is set for science series stardom

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It’s a Big, Big World, a preschool science series from Mitchell Kriegman, promises to be the next big thing for PBS Kids. The series, which will launch with a major promotional push in January, “was an inspiration to us when we thought about what PBS Kids can be,” said John Wilson, PBS co-chief programmer, during the PBS Showcase meeting in Las Vegas. Kriegman, Emmy-winning creator of Disney’s Bear in the Big Blue House and Nickelodeon’s Clarissa Explains It All, unveiled the series during an April 12 [2005] breakfast at the PBS conference. “From my point of view, I’ve arrived in my career” by bringing to PBS a competitive show that will help children learn and grow, he said. Kriegman began developing the concept after 9/11.

Children's programming

Is Tinky a gay role model for boys, or a purple toddler in full play?

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International stardom has not been easy for Tinky Winky, the Teletubby recently “outed” by the Rev. Jerry Falwell as a gay role-model for children. First there was a big flap in England, shortly after the show’s 1997 debut, over the dismissal of the actor playing Tinky Winky. Producers said he had been too rambunctious on the set. But the actor apparently endeared himself to viewers by flamboyantly waving the now-notorious red handbag, and did not go quietly. The Sun, Britain’s largest tabloid, launched a campaign to reinstate the actor, but to no avail.

Programs/Content

We’ll look back on this old Barney: an early input-output gizmo you could hug

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Dolls have talked for years, but it was Microsoft’s ActiMates Interactive Barney that became a full-fledged peripheral for the computer–with hints of the nifty and bizarre stuff that will flood the world when digital broadcasting begins. Next month, at Toy Fair ’98 in New York City, the company is expected to announce the addition of an Arthur doll to the ActiMates line, and Children’s Television Workshop will introduce a similar smart doll of its own. And if the technology inside these little wriggling, sensing and talking input-output dolls develops as rapidly as other digital devices do, in a few years we’ll see smarter descendants become tools and toys for older kids and adults as well. For kids in the 2-3 range, and for Microsoft, Barney was enough of a phenomenon for now. Though Sesame Street’s much cheaper “Sing & Snore Ernie” easily outsold it, hundreds of thousands of Barneys galumphed out of the stores.