This episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast is part of a sponsored series produced in partnership with WildBrain Media Solutions. We get together with Kate Smith, EVP of Audience Engagement at WildBrain to talk about what constitutes a TV Network in 2026.

Within the industry the term "distribution" has evolved. Kate opens by sharing how WildBrain has pioneered its own Network, driven by TV viewing insights. The company has quietly become one of the dominant operators in kids' FAST channels and on YouTube, holding over 50% of all kids and family channels across major FAST platforms in the US and operating 800 YouTube channels.

We explore how YouTube and FAST serve different but complementary functions — YouTube as a discovery engine, FAST as a destination for fans who already know what they want — and why legacy IP with multigenerational appeal continues to drive the strongest long-form viewing numbers.

1. https://bit.ly/WBMSCapabilities

Episode Title: Netflix Playground: Is Netflix Building the Answer to YouTube Kids? — A Kids Media Club Bonus Episode

Episode Summary:

A short bonus episode with Andy and Emily Horgan, recorded to react to a significant announcement from Netflix that landed while Emily was on holiday — which she notes felt like being deliberately trolled. Netflix has launched the Netflix Playground app, a dedicated gaming environment aimed at preschoolers and young children, and Emily has thoughts.

The context matters here. Emily and her team published a Netflix gaming report back in December, identifying two structural problems with how Netflix games worked: first, users had to download games as separate apps and log in via their Netflix account rather than accessing them seamlessly within the platform; and second, kids games weren't available within kids profiles, creating an awkward tension between safety and discoverability. Shortly after publishing, the Netflix gaming team reached out to acknowledge the issues — and Playground is, in effect, their response.

The app is pitched at eight and under, though Emily reads it as skewing younger still. It's ad-free with no in-app purchases, and the integration with Netflix accounts is noticeably more seamless than what came before. The content mix is interesting: alongside expected IP like Peppa Pig and Sesame Street, there are a handful of Dr. Seuss titles, StoryBots (which Netflix owns outright), and — the pick that catches Emily's attention most — Bad Dinosaurs. She reads that inclusion as a signal that Netflix is thinking about underleveraged IP: shows that proved sticky and connected with audiences but were left as one-and-done, with all that demonstrated audience value sitting idle. The same announcement also included a renewal for Trash Truck, a soft preschool show with no new content since 2021 that has nonetheless been quietly hanging around in the Netflix data — the kind of quiet buoyancy, Emily argues, that deserves attention.

The bigger question the episode circles is whether Netflix Playground could become a genuine walled-garden alternative to YouTube Kids. Emily's instinct when she first saw the announcement was that this could be exactly that — a fully curated, safe digital environment for young children. At launch it's games only, with no video streaming, and the games themselves lean gentle: jigsaws, colouring, slow-paced play. Emily is genuinely on the fence about whether combining video and games in a single environment would be a good thing for that age group, and notes that parents she's spoken to tend to want a clear distinction between screen-time modes. But the underlying observation stands: YouTube Kids, for all its reach, is algorithmically curated and carries a lot of content that isn't exactly nutritious. If Netflix were to go further with Playground, there's a real gap it could fill.

The app launched in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand — but not Ireland, which Emily takes as a personal slight.

Key Takeaways:

1. Netflix Playground is a dedicated kids gaming app aimed at eight and under, ad-free and with no in-app purchases — a direct response to the discovery and safety problems Emily's team had identified and published in their Netflix gaming report.
2. The login and access experience is significantly more seamless than Netflix's previous gaming setup, which required separate app downloads and created friction for both parents and kids.
3. The IP selection is telling — Bad Dinosaurs and Trash Truck both signal that Netflix is paying attention to underleveraged content with proven audience buoyancy, rather than defaulting only to its biggest franchises.
4. Quiet persistence in viewing data is worth watching — Trash Truck has had no new content since 2021 yet continues to hang around in Netflix engagement numbers. Emily argues that this kind of staying power without activation is a meaningful signal.
5. The walled-garden question is the big one — Netflix Playground has the potential to position itself as a curated, safe alternative to YouTube Kids, but at launch it's games only, and whether video content follows remains to be seen.
6. Netflix's gaming momentum is deliberate and sustained — this isn't a one-off launch left to find its own level. The Playground app is the latest in a series of iterative moves that suggest gaming is a genuine strategic priority, not an experiment.
7. YouTube Kids has a quality problem that a well-executed Netflix alternative could exploit — algorithmic curation means content of variable quality gets through, and parents of young children are an audience actively looking for something more controlled and curated.

Episode Summary:

Jo is away in Lisbon for this episode, leaving Andy and Emily Horgan to kick things off with a discussion about a timely YouTube Culture and Trends report — Animation's New Wave: How Independent Online Animators Are Reshaping the Entertainment Industry — before bringing in a guest who feels almost like the report's cover star: indie animator and creator Emily Brundige of Strawberry Vampire.

The episode opens with Andy and Emily Horgan picking apart the YouTube report, which surveyed 614 animation fans aged 14 to 24 and found that the majority prefer watching indie animated series on YouTube over major studio output, and that over half watch animation content in languages other than their own. Emily Horgan is candid about the report's limitations — the sample size is modest, and the framing is clearly designed to serve YouTube's own commercial interests — but argues that the very fact YouTube has invested in packaging and publishing this data is itself meaningful. It signals that independent animation on the platform is something YouTube is actively trying to cultivate, not just observe. The Amazing Digital Circus is cited as the headline proof of concept.

The discussion quickly turns to two creators who are living the indie animation reality right now. Tiny Chef — the beloved stop-motion show that started as an indie project, got picked up by Nickelodeon, and was then cancelled in the fallout from the Paramount/Skydance gridlock — is highlighted as an instructive case study in building an ecosystem around a show. The viral cancellation clip that made it onto Good Morning America was the moment, but what mattered as much as the moment was the infrastructure already in place: the Instagram following, the merch website, the email list, the Fwiend Club membership community. Brand partnerships with Greggs and IKEA have since followed — a smart alignment of the chef IP with food and home brands — though Emily Horgan raises the very real challenge of knowing how to value those deals when you have no background in commercial negotiations and your back is against the wall.

The second half of the episode brings in Emily Brundige directly, joining from Little Toughy Studio for a check-in on Strawberry Vampire. When the pilot animatic launched last Halloween on a channel with just 2,000 subscribers, it got 60,000 views in 48 hours and has since passed 200,000. A passionate fandom has formed around a show that, at this point, consists of an animatic and a handful of shorts. Now, with a second Kickstarter running — this time with a larger goal so she can actually pay her collaborators properly — she's at 79% funded with six days to go. She describes the campaign as a tight basketball match she's still watching closely, but the response has already validated the core question she was testing: whether fans who love the IP would put their hand in their pocket to make more of it.

Emily Brundige is refreshingly open about the reality of being a one-person studio and one-person marketing operation simultaneously. The Substack she launched after her first appearance on the podcast now has over 1,000 readers, feeding back into her YouTube channel and building genuine two-way momentum. The Kickstarter rewards are thoughtfully designed — plushie keychains, pins, stickers, custom painted resin figures by animation industry heavyweights including Penn Ward, Patrick McHale, Lauren Faust, and Jorge Gutierrez — and she's offered ten backers the chance to appear as background characters in the animatic, a clever fandom participation play. The episode ends with Andy and Emily Horgan pledging $150 to get the Kids Media Club podcast a thank you in the credits.

Running through the whole conversation is a broader point about what quality means in independent animation. Both Emilys and Andy observe that audiences — particularly the 14-to-24 demographic YouTube is courting — are perfectly happy watching animatics if the characters and story resonate. The definition of production quality is shifting, and authenticity and community are increasingly the things that build lasting audiences, not polish.

Support Emily Brundige's Strawberry Vampire Kickstarter here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/strawberryvampire/strawberry-vampire-help-us-make-the-next-episode

Key Takeaways:

1. YouTube's indie animation report is as much a strategic signal as a data release — the platform is actively trying to cultivate independent animation as a category, and the report is a way of giving that ecosystem legitimacy and visibility.
2. The 14-to-24 demographic is driving indie animation — YouTube's data points to this age group as the primary audience, and notably the report focuses entirely on them rather than the under-13s. The kids designation remains commercially and regulatorily thorny for creators on the platform.
3. Tiny Chef's story shows that infrastructure matters as much as the viral moment — the cancellation clip went massively viral, but the email list, merch site, and community membership already in place meant they could convert that attention into sustainable support.
4. Brand partnerships are a viable revenue lever for indie creators, but knowing how to value them without commercial experience is a real challenge that the industry hasn't yet solved for independent producers.
5. Crowdfunding works best when the audience is built before the campaign launches — Emily Brundige's advice is to start collecting emails well in advance of a Kickstarter, giving fans notice and building a list of people who have already signalled they'll support the project.
6. Building in public creates authenticity and fandom — sharing the process of making a show from the animatic stage outward turns production transparency into a community-building tool, and audiences respond to that inclusion.
7. Quality is being redefined by independent animation — audiences who love a show's characters and story will watch animatics, shorts, and work-in-progress content. Full production polish is no longer a prerequisite for building a devoted following.
8. Creative freedom is one of indie animation's most underrated advantages — Emily Brundige contrasts over a decade in traditional studios, where creators have no say over merch or IP decisions, with the indie model where she can commission a comic, make merch decisions, and shape the universe entirely on her own terms.
9. The ecosystem around an IP matters as much as the IP itself — Substack, YouTube, email lists, Kickstarter, merch, and brand partnerships are all parts of the same machine, and indie creators who build across all of them have multiple ways to sustain their work.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. kidsmediaclubpodcast.com

This episode, sponsored by Innov8 Creative Academy and Deddy Bears, sees Andy and Emily joined by two guests who met through a thoroughly Irish chain of mutual acquaintances and ended up building something genuinely unusual together. Gavin Lawler is the founder of Innov8 Creative Academy — a toy inventor and entrepreneur with over 250 IPs in his portfolio and a background that includes the Irish Fairy Door Company. Chris Dicker is a kids media showrunner and creator with a long career in the industry, including time at Jam Media. They're currently collaborating on Deddy Bears: a creepy-cute collectible toy brand that has sold over 10 million units in under three years and is now moving into content, with a YouTube series in production and a feature film in development.

Gavin opens by telling the story of the Irish Fairy Door Company — half a million units sold at twenty pounds each in Ireland, a business that worked brilliantly at home but struggled to translate internationally because the Irishness was too specific and the product too niche. The lesson he took from it was the need to design for a global audience from the outset. Since then, Innov8 Creative Academy has built a reputation as a rapid trend-identification and commercialisation machine — the Six7 plush is cited as an example of a product that went from a six-hour design turnaround to hundreds of thousands of units sold in a matter of weeks. The model is built on firing small bullets: get to market fast and cheaply, test sell-through, and only scale what lands.

Deddy Bears emerged from a 36-hour design sprint for a Walmart Canada Halloween brief. The buyer initially chose a different product, but when that proved too complex to execute, Deddy Bears got the slot by default — and promptly achieved 86% sell-through in its first season, opening doors to major retailers across 50 countries. The bears come in coffins with death certificates, each character has a backstory ranging from ancient Egypt to the modern day, and the whole thing sits in that now-familiar cultural territory occupied by Wednesday Addams, Stranger Things, and Five Nights at Freddy's: once-alternative content that has been thoroughly normalised for family audiences and is, as Gavin puts it bluntly, extracting cash from people's pockets.

The conversation that forms the heart of the episode is about what happens when these two worlds — fast-cycle toy invention and long-form IP development — collide. Chris describes arriving into a brand that already had a fandom and realising his first job was simply to listen: to go to New York Toy Fair, watch the fans and influencers, understand who was actually buying the bears and why, before writing a single word. What he found surprised him — a remarkably wide demographic ranging from children collecting blind bags to 20-something women forming deep emotional attachments to the characters, caring about packaging, wanting to know the lore. The Giphy page Gavin's wife Aoife created as a half-joke hit 10 million shares within weeks of launch, including a front-page feature on April Fool's Day, and neither Gavin nor Chris fully saw it coming.

There's a genuinely interesting structural argument running through the episode about the relationship between content and IP. Chris's view — shaped by coming into a brand that already had proven market demand — is that content doesn't always have to carry all the weight; sometimes it exists to support IP rather than create it. Gavin's perspective is that the toy market has always needed to fire small bullets and test quickly, and that traditional media could learn from this rather than committing millions upfront in the hope that an audience materialises. Both agree that character, not plot, is the fundamental unit of connection — plot matters the first time, but audiences return to hang out with characters they love.

The episode ends with a look at what's next: the YouTube series launches this summer, studio conversations for the feature film are underway in LA, and Gavin makes the point that the priority now isn't a money grab — the IP is already selling — but finding the right partners who respect and bring along the fandom that already exists.

Key Takeaways:

• Irish Fairy Door Company's international struggles taught Gavin a key lesson: a product built on cultural specificity needs to offer something universally resonant underneath, and Irishness alone isn't enough to drive global commercial scale.
• Rapid trend identification and small-bullet commercialisation is a replicable model: Innov8 Creative Academy's approach — spot a trend early, design fast, test at retail, scale only what sells — offers a very different risk profile to traditional IP development.
• Deddy Bears succeeded almost by accident, getting its Walmart listing by default when a more complex design proved undeliverable, but the 86% sell-through in season one validated the concept and opened up major global retail partnerships.
• The "creepy-cute" category is now mainstream, not alternative — Stranger Things, Wednesday Addams, and Five Nights at Freddy's have normalised it for family audiences, and there is clear commercial appetite that the kids media industry hasn't fully caught up with yet.
• Content doesn't always have to come first — Chris's argument is that in IP terms, content should sometimes support and amplify an existing fandom rather than being the thing that creates it. The audience for Deddy Bears existed before a single frame of animation was made.
• Character is the fundamental unit of connection, not plot. Audiences return to hang out with characters they love; plot is only new once. Both Gavin and Chris build from this principle outward.
• Listening to fandom before creating content is essential — Chris spent months observing the Deddy Bears audience before writing anything, recognising that those fans were there before him and that the content has to bring them along, not override them.
• Existing fandom is a golden ticket and a responsibility — the Deddy Bears Giphy page hitting 10 million shares weeks after launch (including front-page on April Fool's Day) is proof of concept, and both Gavin and Chris are focused on choosing partners who understand and respect the community that's already there.
• Traditional media has something to learn from the toy inventor's model — as producers take on more financial risk in a world with fewer broadcast partners willing to fund development, the ability to test cheaply, fail fast, and scale only proven concepts becomes increasingly relevant.
• The consumers want to hang out with their characters — Gavin's insight, crystallised by working with Chris, is that the emotional hook of a toy and the emotional hook of a TV character are essentially the same thing, and the two industries are more aligned than either has historically recognised.

Links referenced in this episode:

• InnovateCreativeAcademy
• TeddyBears
• DeaddyBears
• IrishFairyDoorCompany

Companies mentioned in this episode:

• Innovate Creative Academy
• Teddy Bears
• Deaddy Bears
• Irish Fairy Door Company
• Kardashians
• Jam Media
• Stranger Things
• Disney
• Pokémon
• Five Nights at Freddy's
• Wednesday Addams
• Walmart
• Target
• Smiths
• 5 Below
• Amazon

With Emily otherwise occupied, this episode is a hosts' hangout — just Andy and Jo, with a car pickup deadline providing a natural time limit. The conversation covers three topics: the appointment of the BBC's new Director General, the news that YouTube kids show Danny Go has been picked up by Netflix, and some cautious optimism about original IP at the box office.

The BBC discussion centres on what the hiring of Matt Britton — who comes from a background in big tech and spent a significant stretch at Google — signals about the direction of travel for the corporation. Andy and Jo read it as a confirmation of the shift from a channel-first to a platform-first BBC, a move already evidenced by the recently announced partnership with YouTube, under which BBC Children's is launching seven new channels to reach younger, social-video-first audiences. The appointment of someone steeped in data, global distribution, and commercial scale feels deliberate. The hope is that Britton brings a more aggressive commercial mindset to BBC Studios — the revenue-generating arm that has historically played second fiddle to the UK public service operation — and that the BBC uses its considerable global brand equity before it erodes further. In an era of AI-generated content proliferation, trusted, quality brands matter more than ever, and the BBC's international reputation is still a real asset, particularly in the kids space.

The Danny Go segment is full of enthusiasm. The YouTube-native kids show — music-led, high energy, and genuinely well-produced in a way Jo compares to the Wiggles — has just been picked up by Netflix, and Andy argues it could give Ms. Rachel a run for her money once it lands on the platform. The broader point the conversation develops is about the YouTube-to-Netflix pipeline and what it now represents. YouTube functions as an incubation layer — a place where creators build audiences, make their mistakes, and prove their concept — before Netflix swoops in once the risk has been de-risked. Crucially, the exclusivity model that Netflix once insisted on seems to have softened: like Ms. Rachel, Danny Go is expected to remain on YouTube alongside its Netflix presence. Andy frames the Netflix pickup as something like peer review, or the moment an online-only brand gets stocked in a major department store — it confers credibility and marks a kind of graduation. The caveat is that Danny Go has been building since 2019, which leads to a broader point about fandom: you simply cannot speed run it. The Savannah Bananas are cited alongside Baller League as parallel examples of IPs that have taken seven or eight years of patient building before distribution deals and mainstream attention arrived.

The episode closes on a note of measured optimism about original IP. Hoppers for Pixar and Disney and Project Hail Mary both get name-checked as encouraging signs that audiences haven't entirely given up on new ideas — that the franchise-only approach, while understandable from a risk management perspective, isn't the only game in town. The hope is that commissioning budgets eventually follow the same signal.

Key Takeaways:

1. The BBC's appointment of a Director General from a big tech background signals a deliberate shift towards a platform-first, data-literate, globally-minded BBC — one that is more willing to treat distribution partnerships with the likes of YouTube as opportunity rather than threat.
2. BBC Studios and the BBC's global brand equity should be leveraged now, before that value erodes — the trust premium on quality, branded content is growing in an era of AI-generated content proliferation, and the BBC is well placed to capitalise on it internationally.
3. YouTube is functioning as Netflix's R&D department for kids content — Netflix is letting creators build and prove their audiences on YouTube, then acquiring those that break through, rather than taking the development risk itself.
4. The exclusivity model appears to have changed — both Ms. Rachel and Danny Go suggest Netflix is now comfortable with creators maintaining their YouTube presence alongside a Netflix deal, recognising that the audience was built there and can't simply be relocated.
5. A Netflix pickup now carries a credibility signal — landing on Netflix after building on YouTube functions like moving from a direct-to-consumer website into a major bricks-and-mortar retailer, conferring legitimacy and reach.
6. You cannot speed run fandom — Danny Go has been building since 2019, the Savannah Bananas since 2019, Baller League for over two years. The IPs that are now doing distribution deals have typically been at it for seven or eight years. Patient, consistent building is the pattern, not overnight success.
7. Original IP is showing signs of life at the box office — Project Hail Mary's strong hold into its second weekend, alongside Hoppers and K Pop Demon Hunters, suggests audience appetite for new stories hasn't been extinguished by the franchise era, even if the studio system hasn't fully caught up with that yet.
8. Commissioning investment into quality kids content remains under pressure, and the concern is that the YouTube-to-Netflix pipeline, while exciting, doesn't fully substitute for a healthy commissioning ecosystem that takes risks on original ideas from the outset.

This is a short, unplanned emergency episode — Andy, Jo, and Emily jumping on a three-way call in real time to react to a double dose of seismic industry news landing in the same day. First came the announcement that World Screen (and its TV Kids publication) would be ceasing to publish. Then, as the episode was being recorded, the news dropped that the Kids Screen Summit would not be returning in 2027, with parent company Brunico Communications confirming it is discontinuing its entire US events portfolio — Kids Screen, Realscreen, and NATPE among them. Jocelyn Christie, who has long been the face of Kids Screen, is also departing.

The trio don't dress it up. Kids Screen Summit has been, as the official announcement itself acknowledges, the heartbeat of the international kids content community for 30 years — the event that defined careers, brokered relationships, and gave the industry its annual gathering point. Its loss, coming alongside World Screen's closure, feels like more than a coincidence of bad timing.

The conversation quickly moves to the why. Andy notes that the most recent Kids Screen Summit was noticeably down on attendance, raising real questions about whether the numbers could ever add up again. Jo and Emily point to the structural shifts underneath: the kids media industry is under sustained pressure across funding, distribution, and monetisation, and the traditional event model — built around large corporate delegations from major broadcasters like Disney who could absorb the cost of sending whole departments — no longer reflects the reality of who is actually in the room. With fewer buyers, a more fragmented landscape, and individual attendees increasingly having to justify the expense themselves, the value proposition has fundamentally changed.

There's a broader point made about what these events were actually for, and whether that purpose still exists. Andy frames it neatly: these conferences were built around the gravitational pull of the big broadcasters, and when that gravitational force weakens, everything orbiting around it drifts. Emily raises the comparison with World Screen's TV Kids online summits, which have continued to attract strong speakers without requiring anyone to get on a plane — a model that perhaps points to where things are heading.

The episode ends on a note that's equal parts rueful and forward-looking, with Jo floating the idea that the Kids Media Club itself might have a role to play in filling some of the vacuum being left behind.

Key Takeaways:

1. Kids Screen Summit will not return in 2027, with Brunico Communications discontinuing its full US events portfolio — a significant moment for an event that has been central to the kids content industry for three decades.
2. World Screen and TV Kids have also ceased publishing, meaning the industry has lost two major institutional pillars in a single day.
3. Declining attendance was already a warning sign — the most recent Kids Screen was visibly down on numbers, raising questions about sustainability that have now been answered.
4. The traditional event model was built for a different industry — when major broadcasters could fund large corporate delegations, the economics worked. With fewer buyers and more individual attendees justifying costs themselves, the model has become increasingly difficult to sustain.
5. This is symptomatic of deeper industry-wide pressure — the loss of these events reflects the same structural stresses around funding, distribution, and monetisation that have been reshaping kids media more broadly.
6. The gravitational pull of the big broadcasters is weakening — and the conferences, markets, and publications that were built around that pull are feeling it acutely.
7. Online events may point to a more viable model — the TV Kids online summits are cited as an example of strong programming delivered without the barrier of travel costs and logistics.
8. A vacuum is forming, and the question of what — or who — fills it is now very much open.

This bonus episode takes a different format, with Emily reporting live from the Animation Dingle Festival in County Kerry, Ireland. Rather than a single guest, the episode brings together three separate conversations captured across the festival weekend: an interview with co-founder and festival director Maurice Galway, a chat with veteran screenwriter and director Karey Kirkpatrick, and a conversation with Ailbhe Fearon and Muireann Mulvihill, the two recent graduates who swept the festival's Animation Awards with their short film Anam.

Maurice sets the scene by explaining what makes Animation Dingle distinct from the industry's typical market-driven events. Now approaching its 15th year, the festival deliberately caps attendance at 750 and keeps its split exactly 50/50 between students and professionals — a structural choice that keeps the focus squarely on education and mentorship rather than deal-making. Maurice talks through several initiatives designed to lower the intimidation barrier for students, including the "Pitch and a Pint" session where students pitch directly to executives from broadcasters and streamers, a new confessional-style format for sharing ideas too wild or half-formed for a public pitch, and a "Tell Your Untold Story" stage coaching session. A theme Maurice returns to is the two-way nature of the inspiration: professionals arrive to give, and consistently leave having received something themselves from the energy and enthusiasm in the room.

Karey Kirkpatrick brings a sharp perspective on the state of the industry, drawing on a long career that includes work with Aardman and multiple original features. The central argument she makes is that the entertainment industry has become so risk-averse — particularly as studios answer to shareholders rather than creative leads — that the idea of a "sure thing" has taken over, even though it doesn't really exist. She uses K Pop Demon Hunters as a case study in how a genuinely original, unconventional idea can catch fire when it's given the right platform and timing, but notes that the same idea would likely have been passed over repeatedly in a pitch room. The conversation turns to what this means for emerging creators, and Karey's advice is clear and practical: don't wait to be discovered through a pitch, make things. Streamers in particular, she argues, are increasingly behaving like distribution platforms rather than development partners — meaning the work needs to demonstrate proof of concept before it reaches them, not after. Her summary advice to students is to build the craft fundamentals so that when a door opens, they can handle the pressure that comes with it.

The episode closes with Ailbhe Fearon and Muireann Mulvihill, whose Irish-language short Anam — meaning "soul" — won seven awards at the festival, including the overall Student Animation Award. The film, about an old man and a young boy on the Aran Island of Inis Oírr, grew out of a two-week research residency on the island and draws on the philosophy of John O'Donohue and the concept of the inner child. Their commitment to making the film in Irish — not translating an English script but constructing it in the language from the ground up, down to getting the specific Inis Oírr dialect right — gives the conversation a quietly profound dimension. They also share the story of reaching out to musician Brian McGlynn (of New Vagabond) after listening to his album on repeat throughout their residency, and his score going on to win its own award at the festival. Both are newly graduated and keen to stay in the Irish animation space.

Key Takeaways:

1. Animation Dingle is deliberately not a market — the 50/50 student-to-professional split and the cap of 750 attendees are design choices that protect the festival's educational culture and make it distinct from every other industry gathering.
2. Lowering the stakes unlocks participation — the confessional-style pitch format and the "Tell Your Untold Story" session are thoughtful responses to listening to what students actually need, recognising that not everyone thrives in a high-pressure public pitch environment.
3. Inspiration runs both ways — professionals who come to give frequently report leaving re-energised by students' creativity and enthusiasm, something Maurice says has become one of the festival's unexpected gifts.
4. There is no such thing as a sure thing in entertainment — Karey Kirkpatrick's core argument is that the attempt to science-ify creative risk is both futile and damaging, and that some of the industry's biggest successes (K Pop Demon Hunters, Anora) would have struggled to get made under current risk frameworks.
5. Fear is driving creative conservatism at the executive level — the pressure of reporting to shareholders rather than creative stakeholders means executives default to "defensible" choices over bold ones, which is hurting original IP across the board.
6. Streamers are becoming distributors, not developers — Karey's observation that streamers want work that's already beyond the idea phase, already executed with some competence, has significant implications for how emerging creators should be thinking about building their careers.
7. For students entering the industry: make things, build FOMO — the practical advice from Karey is to create a body of work that generates a sense of momentum and demand, rather than waiting for a pitch to land. Proof of engagement is now more valuable than a great pitch alone.
8. The Irish language is a storytelling asset, not just a box to tick — Ailbhe Fearon and Mulreann's insistence on making Anam in Irish rather than dubbing it, and their careful attention to Inis Oírr dialect, is held up as an example of authenticity that audiences and judges responded to strongly.
9. Animation in Ireland is in a strong moment — the quality of student work on show at Animation Dingle, and the international talent it attracts, reflects a wider sense that Irish animation is punching well above its weight as an industry.

In this episode, Andy, Jo, and Emily are joined by Ashley Mady, President of Zigazoo — a social media platform built specifically for kids that has been quietly growing its user base to over 10 million while the wider debate around children and social media has grown louder and louder. The timing feels right: with social media bans for under-16s being debated in legislatures around the world, Zigazoo makes the case that the answer isn't to shut kids out of online social spaces altogether, but to build better ones.

Ashley walks through what Zigazoo actually is and how it works. At its core, the platform is challenge-based — kids respond to video prompts by creating their own short-form content, and everything goes through moderation before it reaches the feed. The design philosophy is the inverse of most COPPA-compliant platforms, which tend to solve the safety problem by removing engagement entirely. Zigazoo keeps kids active and social, it just does so within guardrails built by educators rather than pure tech entrepreneurs. The founding team — husband and wife Zak and Leah — bring that dual lens of engineering and digital wellness to every product decision, and Ashley is clear that the mission is read aloud at every team meeting to keep it front and centre.

The moderation conversation is illuminating. Zigazoo started with round-the-clock human moderation but has since developed a hybrid "human in the loop" model where AI handles the initial filtering — including detecting whether a user is a child or adult and flagging inappropriate content — while humans remain part of the process. The addition of a comments feature, which was held back for years due to concerns about intent being lost in written text, was only made possible once AI became reliable enough to support it.

There's a lot of ground covered on what the platform has learned about kids' behaviour online. Notably, Zigazoo found that punishing bad content didn't work as well as rewarding good content — a shift from early notification-heavy approaches to a model that simply surfaces positive posts and lets the algorithm do the teaching. Kids who post well get featured; kids who don't get silence rather than a telling-off, and they adjust accordingly. The existing community of over 1,000 kid creators reinforces those norms organically, policing the platform's culture with a pride of ownership that Ashley describes as one of its most unexpected and valuable outcomes.

The platform's audience data is interesting in its own right. While Zigazoo launched as a preschool app, its core audience has aged with it — 9 to 12 year olds are now its most active creators, and some users who joined five years ago are still on the platform at 15. Rather than losing them to mainstream social media, Zigazoo has had to keep evolving to stay relevant, a challenge Ashley acknowledges openly and with some enthusiasm.

The brand and commercial side of the platform gets a thorough airing too. Over 100 brands — from Paramount and Amazon to toy companies, sports organisations, and publishers — use Zigazoo as a COPPA-compliant way to build genuine two-way community with kids. The platform vets all brand partners for mission alignment and manages their channels directly, which keeps the quality high but also means brands get something genuinely rare: verified, bot-free engagement with actual children. A wishlist feature that sends personalised emails to parents when a child saves a product is highlighted as a standout commercial innovation — formalising the influence kids have over family purchasing decisions in a way no other platform can currently match.

The episode closes on a broader cultural note. Ashley sees the current generation of kids as meaningfully different from their parents — more media literate, more aware of the downsides of social media, and more interested in positive online experiences. Jo echoes this from her own experience as a parent, noting a generational swing away from the open, unguarded approach their own generation took to early social media. The group agrees that banning kids from social media entirely risks pushing them towards unmoderated spaces via VPNs and hand-me-down phones, and that platforms like Zigazoo represent the more responsible path.

Key Takeaways:

1. Zigazoo makes the case for building better social media rather than banning it — the platform argues that keeping kids off social altogether drives them to less safe alternatives, and that the right response is purposefully designed, moderated spaces.
2. The challenge-based model is central to how it works — kids respond to video prompts with their own content, creating active participation rather than passive scrolling, while everything is moderated before reaching the feed.
3. Rewarding good behaviour outperforms punishing bad behaviour — early attempts to notify kids when content failed moderation created a negative experience. Surfacing good posts and letting poor ones disappear quietly proved far more effective at shaping behaviour.
4. AI-assisted "human in the loop" moderation has unlocked new features, including the comments section that was held back for years — a reminder that moderation technology, not just policy intent, sets the ceiling for what's safely possible on kids' platforms.
5. The platform's community polices itself — 1,000+ kid creators model positive behaviour, and when TikTok faced its US ban and new users flooded in, existing Zigazoo users actively told newcomers that this was a different kind of space.
6. Age-gating within the platform recognises that under-16 isn't a monolith — the experience for a 6-year-old looks nothing like that for a 13-year-old, a distinction that blanket social media bans tend to collapse entirely.
7. Zigazoo has become a Gen Alpha trend intelligence platform — with 10 million users and polling features originally built for fun, the platform now has genuine insight into what kids are talking about, buying, and looking forward to, before those trends surface elsewhere.
8. The brand model is built on mission alignment and white-glove management — brands can't self-serve onto the platform, which keeps commercial activity COPPA-compliant and maintains trust with parents and kids alike.
9. The wishlist-to-parent email feature is a commercial innovation worth watching — it formalises child-to-parent purchase influence in a privacy-safe, opt-in way that no other platform currently offers.
10. Parent involvement is baked in from signup, which Ashley argues leads to longer platform lifecycles — a child whose parent has given informed consent is far less likely to be pulled off the platform than one who has found their way onto something their parents don't know about.

This bonus episode of the Kids Media Club sees Andy and Jo joined by Emily, who has just published her latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report — a deep dive into Netflix's engagement data covering the second half of 2025. It's a data-rich conversation that covers which shows are winning, which are declining, and what it all means for the wider kids content landscape.

The headline finding is that Paw Patrol has taken the number one spot by hours viewed in H2 2025, driven by its first-ever US Netflix window opening in July. It's a significant moment that underscores just how competitive the preschool segment has become — Gabby's Dollhouse held the top spot in H1, Ms. Rachel has climbed from sixth to fourth place, and Cocomelon, while still enormous, is showing signs of decline. The preschool race, as Emily puts it, is very much a ten or fifteen horse race.

Sesame Street's arrival on Netflix gets a thoughtful treatment. Launching with just four episodes, it performed modestly — and the group unpick why. Is it a volume problem? A brand perception issue, with audiences still associating the show firmly with PBS and YouTube rather than Netflix? Or simply that Sesame Street hasn't yet established a home on the platform? Emily is generous in her read of it, noting the brand's smart collaboration with YouTube creator Mark Rober as a savvy move to stay relevant — and Rober's own Netflix show, Crunch Lab, posted strong launch numbers.

That leads into a broader conversation about Netflix's creator economy strategy. The platform has been quietly building a pipeline of YouTube-native talent — Cocomelon, Little Angel, Blippi, Ms. Rachel, and now Mark Rober — and the data suggests the crossover approach is paying off in engagement terms. Jo raises the interesting point that Netflix appeared to step back from kids originals after disbanding its dedicated team, only to start commissioning original and exclusive content with creator talent again. The consensus is that Netflix never fully stepped away — it just got more selective, leaning into broader "family" content alongside its core kids slate.

SpongeBob emerges as one of the episode's most interesting talking points. Generating 143 million hours viewed on Netflix without a US window, Emily argues the Sponge is quietly having a moment that the industry isn't talking about loudly enough. She floats the prediction that SpongeBob could overtake Bluey as the top kids show in US streaming in 2026 — and notes what the strength of both SpongeBob and the Warner animation catalog (Teen Titans Go, The Amazing World of Gumball) could mean in the context of the Paramount-Warner merger.

The deeper theme running through the episode is the extraordinary durability of long-running IP. Paw Patrol at 15 years old, SpongeBob at 25, Peppa at 20 — these shows have entered a multigenerational pass-down mode where they remain fresh enough for new young audiences while carrying nostalgia value for older ones. For anyone trying to break through with a new show, that's the competitive reality they're up against.

The episode closes with a look at Gabby's Dollhouse's prospects for long-term franchise status, and a frank assessment of Cocomelon's decline — which Emily argues is structural rather than a failure of execution, given how narrowly age-targeted the IP is by design.

Key Takeaways:

1. Paw Patrol is Netflix's most-viewed kids show in H2 2025, powered by its US streaming debut — a clear illustration of how much a new territory window can move the needle on an established IP.
2. Preschool is the most competitive segment on Netflix, with Gabby's Dollhouse, Ms. Rachel, Paw Patrol, and Cocomelon all jostling for position. No single show dominates the full year.
3. Sesame Street's modest debut was likely a volume and perception problem — four episodes is thin for a brand of its stature, and audiences may not yet associate it with Netflix given its long history on PBS and YouTube.
4. Netflix's creator-to-streaming pipeline is working — shows like Ms. Rachel and Mark Rober's Crunch Lab demonstrate that YouTube-native talent can drive strong streaming engagement, and Netflix appears to be doubling down on that strategy with original commissions.
5. SpongeBob is underrated in the industry conversation — top animated comedy globally on Netflix without US distribution, and a genuine contender to be the number one kids streaming show in the US in 2026.
6. Long-running, multigenerational IP is the hardest thing to compete with — shows like SpongeBob, Peppa, and Paw Patrol are being passed down from parents who grew up with them, giving them a structural advantage that newer shows simply don't have yet.
7. Cocomelon's decline is structural, not a crisis — its very young target demographic limits its ability to build the multigenerational audience that sustains IP over the long term. Still huge; just not built to grow the way story-driven shows can.
8. Gabby's Dollhouse has genuine franchise longevity potential, particularly if the team can extend the live-action talent into formats that grow with the audience — something Emily sees as a clear opportunity.
9. The "family" designation matters more than it might seem — shows that appeal across age groups, from kids to parents, consistently deliver better engagement numbers and longer shelf lives than narrowly targeted content.

This is the second half of the Kids Media Club's conversation with Chris Heatherly, the former Disney executive who oversaw Club Penguin at its peak. The discussion picks up where part one left off, diving deep into online safety, the realities of moderating kids' platforms at scale, and where kids gaming is headed next.

Chris pulls no punches on the subject of child safety online. He walks through the specific tools Club Penguin used — heavy speech filtering, outright bans for serious offences, and a clever technique called "fake send," where borderline messages appeared to send but were never actually delivered to other users. The insight behind fake send is worth sitting with: when bad actors stopped getting a social reaction to their behaviour, they largely stopped bothering.

He's equally candid about the limits of any platform's ability to keep kids safe, and draws a sharp distinction between what he sees as genuine child protection efforts and a broader political movement using child safety rhetoric to push for internet regulation that would affect everyone. It's a provocative argument, and one that sparks a good back-and-forth with the hosts.

Roblox comes up repeatedly throughout the episode, with Chris offering a robust defence of the platform against what he considers unfair criticism. He points out that the most serious harm tends to happen off platform — predators use Roblox to make contact but drive kids elsewhere to avoid detection — and argues that Roblox's moderation efforts are more substantial than the headlines suggest. He also shares some remarkable behind-the-scenes stories from the Club Penguin era, including a DDoS attack during a Star Wars event that exposed Disney's complete lack of cyber protection, and a subsequent investigation that pointed to a potential hostile foreign actor using teenage hackers as cover.

The conversation then shifts to the state of kids gaming more broadly. Chris argues that the market effectively collapsed after COPPA-style regulation created an uneven playing field — legitimate kids platforms had to comply while others with large child audiences didn't bother — and that Roblox and Minecraft essentially rebuilt it from scratch. His framing of Roblox as "the new console" is a headline moment: he believes it represents a genuine architectural and business model shift away from the console and mobile era, not just another platform.

On the creator economy, Chris is optimistic. He sees AI as the tool that finally lowers the barrier to game creation enough that the YouTube-to-Hollywood pipeline becomes the norm for gaming too. He also flags that handing development over to creators brings its own risks — notably questionable monetisation mechanics — though he's sceptical of some of the more alarmist takes around loot boxes.

The episode closes with a strong point on parental involvement: platforms can't do it alone, and parents need to be treated as a distributed moderation force rather than passive bystanders.

Takeaways:

1. The Kids Media Club podcast is currently accepting sponsorship opportunities for interested parties.
2. Listeners can engage with the podcast via LinkedIn or the official website for strategic conversations.
3. Chris Heatherly, an influential figure at Disney, shared profound insights during our discussion on children's online safety.
4. The conversation surrounding online safety for children remains critical and unresolved after two decades.
5. The challenges faced by Club Penguin in moderating content are similar to those currently confronted by Roblox.
6. We believe that empowering parents to monitor their children's online activity is essential for ensuring their safety.

Links referenced in this episode:

1. kidsmediaclubpodcast.com

Companies mentioned in this episode:

1. Disney
2. Club Penguin
3. Roblox
4. Pinterest
5. Sago Sago
6. Takaboka