Kids Media Club Podcast

Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entertainment News
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Kids Media Club Podcast is a podcast hosted by Jo Redfern, Andy Williams, and Emily Horgan. In each episode they chat with a different guest about the world of Kids Media. The podcast covers everything from trends in animation to the rise of Edtech.

  1. 5d ago ·  Video

    Run Monster Run: How the Creators Behind Solar Balls Are Building Their Next Big YouTube IP

    Three guests on one episode — Oliver and Alvaro, co-founders of Telos Media and the team behind Solar Balls (half a billion views on the English channel alone, 2 billion across all languages), and Mary James, the Hollywood-experienced executive producer who bridges their digital-first world and the mainstream. Together they've just launched Run Monster Run, a new animated IP that hit 20 million views within two weeks of its pilot dropping on YouTube — and they're already fielding inbound interest from platforms. The conversation covers the full playbook: how Solar Balls went from zero to 100,000 subscribers in 10 days and turned profitable within a month; why YouTube was chosen as the launch platform for Run Monster Run over a traditional pitch route; how Discord functions as a fandom hub that sits outside the algorithm; and how Alvaro manages fan engagement with a deliberately mysterious, Easter-egg-heavy approach that keeps communities theorising and proactive without burning through the IP's future potential. The team is refreshingly candid about what they're looking for in a platform partner — and equally clear that they don't need one to proceed. The episode also gets into what makes Run Monster Run different from the current wave of independent animation: a deliberately broad, multigenerational emotional premise, complex lore built for long-term storytelling, and the creative discipline not to show everything at once. A team of 122 people, a theme song co-written by the creators of the Paw Patrol theme, and a shorts strategy designed to deepen character rather than just fill a feed. This one is worth watching closely.

  2. Jul 2 ·  Video

    Amazing Digital Circus Box Office: How Creator-Made Films Are Conquering Cinemas — with Caspar Nadaud of Piece of Magic Entertainment

    Caspar Nadaud, founder of theatrical distribution company Piece of Magic Entertainment, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo to unpack exactly how The Amazing Digital Circus went from a YouTube finale to a global cinema event — and what it reveals about the new relationship between creators, fandoms, and the big screen. Piece of Magic handled European distribution and helped take the Glitch-produced finale to roughly $14 million across 38 markets, with the film's combined US, Canada, and European box office likely exceeding $50 million once Latin America and Asia are factored in. Caspar walks through the mechanics in detail: why engagement, not follower count, is the real predictor of cinema success; why scarcity (limited cinemas, a tight release window) actually amplifies fandom rather than suppressing it; and why The Amazing Digital Circus's event-model release strategy — concentrating nearly all box office into one mobilised weekend — differed sharply from the slower, word-of-mouth build of Markiplier's Iron Lung. He's candid about the projects that didn't work, where huge YouTube numbers didn't translate to engaged, mobilisable audiences, and about how Piece of Magic is still learning to read which fandoms will actually show up. The conversation also covers the changing power dynamic between distributors and creators — a genuine partnership model rather than the old gatekeeper relationship — and closes with a tease of Piece of Magic's next major announcement, plus a broader reflection on cinema's surprising post-pandemic resurgence, driven in large part by Gen Z's appetite for communal, dressed-up, FOMO-driven theatrical moments.

  3. Jun 30 ·  Video

    The Perfect Picnic: Annecy FOMO and First Impressions — with Eric Calderon of Surviving Animation (Bonus Episode)

    A crossover episode with Eric Calderon of Surviving Animation, recorded with Andy and Eric fresh off the ground in Annecy while Jo and Emily nurse their FOMO from home. It's the second collaboration between the two podcasts, and the energy carries that — equal parts industry analysis and genuine enthusiasm for the world's oldest animation festival, which Eric was attending for the first time in 14 years. Eric's framing of Annecy as "the perfect picnic" runs through the whole conversation: a rare alignment of factors — a beautiful lake town, a film festival with genuinely pure independent roots, a market (MIFA) that hasn't been allowed to swallow the festival whole, and a decentralised structure that means choosing one screening means missing five others. The AI conversation gets a sharper edge than in other episodes: Eric describes a genuinely tribal atmosphere, where it's socially acceptable to be loudly anti-AI but considered "punching down" to push back the other way. Both Eric and Andy note the split between students nervous about junior roles disappearing and senior executives trying to figure out workflow integration, with a quieter middle ground that exists but speaks less loudly. Anime emerges as the other dominant theme — not as a trend but as something Eric compares to hip-hop: permanently embedded in the culture, with everyone from the Tokyo government to a hitchhiking Czech animation collective to Warner Bros trying to find their way in. Eric's term for non-Japanese anime-influenced work, "cowboy anime," gets a real airing, alongside the Toei Animation producer's prediction that the future of anime won't be exclusively Japanese-made. There's also a sharp, important critique buried in the conversation: Eric's worry that Annecy is drifting toward becoming a B2C event dominated by corporate slate announcements, and his observation that the real energy and the real audience — the students lining up in the banlieue — are being overlooked by an industry fixated on the Imperial hotel crowd. The episode closes, fittingly, with Eric plugging his Flow-licensed merchandise line and everyone agreeing to make it to Annecy together in person next year.

  4. Jun 25 ·  Video

    Live from Annecy: AI in Animation, How the Festival Works, and Why the "AI Category" Won't Last

    Andy is calling in from Annecy — sunglasses on, rosé imminent, 45 minutes from his accommodation in 38-degree heat — while Jo and Emily hold the fort from home. It's a short, lively check-in from the world's oldest animation festival, and the main topic writing itself on every wall in town is AI. Andy reports that the conversation around AI at Annecy has meaningfully shifted from previous years. The theoretical debate about what AI might mean for animation has largely given way to the practical reality of studios working out how to use it. Students remain understandably anxious about junior roles being squeezed — the very rung of the ladder they need to get started — while producers and execs are focused on workflow integration. Andy's prediction is that a distinct "AI animation" category will eventually become as meaningless as "CGI animation" did after Toy Story: it'll be everywhere, and it'll stop being a label. There's also a quick and genuinely useful primer on how Annecy actually works — the Imperial, MIFA, the old town, the meetings by the lake, the producers dashing between venues who've badly underestimated the distances — for anyone who hasn't been and is thinking about going. Jo and Emily are already planning next year.

  5. Jun 18 ·  Video

    Happy Birthday K-Pop Demon Hunters: One Year On, What Netflix Got Right — and What Comes Next

    It's been a year since K-Pop Demon Hunters dropped on Netflix — quietly, in June 2025, without much fanfare, to a modest first week. The trio mark the anniversary with a look back at how the phenomenon actually unfolded, and a frank assessment of where the franchise goes from here. Emily, Andy, and Jo piece together the real story of the IP's growth: the music videos Netflix pushed to YouTube that first weekend, the summer rewatches that let kids learn the dances, the back-to-school moment that supercharged playground currency, and the 300-plus fan-made Roblox experiences that confirmed something genuinely generational was happening. The consensus is that the slow-burn launch wasn't a failure of marketing — it may have been the making of it. The harder conversation is about what comes next, with a sequel not arriving until 2029. Netflix has done impressive franchise work — Hasbro and Mattel deals, late night appearances, NFL halftime shows, an Oscar — but a year in, there's still no new story content. The trio have thoughts on what that gap needs, and aren't shy about sharing them. Companies mentioned in this episode: NetflixHasbroMattel

  6. Jun 11 ·  Video

    Amazing Digital Circus in Cinemas and Why Creators Are Rewriting the Rules of the Entertainment Industry

    The band is back together — and Jo has news. She's joined Coolabi as SVP of Digital, with a brief that includes Warrior Cats: a book IP 74 volumes deep, a Roblox game at 730 million visits, a Tencent animation in production, and one of the most voracious fandoms in kids media. It's a good segue into the episode's main subject. Amazing Digital Circus was supposed to have a four-day cinema run. It's now been extended to eight weeks, has outgrossed every independent animated movie in its window, and is cosplay screenings are selling out. The trio use it to pick up the thread from last week's creator movie conversation — but this time with a focus on what it means structurally. Creators who own their IP are coming into rooms with broadcasters and studios from a position of security rather than permission, and the entertainment industry is only beginning to reckon with what that shift means for how rights deals get structured. The conversation also takes a sharp turn into social media regulation and what an under-16 ban would actually mean for the kind of co-created fandom that put Amazing Digital Circus in cinemas in the first place — Kane Parsons, after all, taught himself Blender on Discord at 14. It's the episode's most unresolved and most important thread, and one the podcast will clearly be returning to.

  7. Jun 4 ·  Video

    Backrooms, Obsession, and the Creator Movie Moment: What It Means for Kids and Teens Media

    A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing successive weeks of audience growth in theatres. The last film to do that was E.T. The conversation goes beyond the hot takes to ask what's actually driving it. Andy and Jo's argument is that this isn't really about filmmaking — it's about trust, built slowly, over years of showing up for an audience before it ever made commercial sense to do so. The parasocial relationships these creators have with their fans are something no studio can manufacture, and the co-created lore around something like Backrooms means audiences don't just watch the film — they feel they made it. Mr. Beast is the useful counterexample: so big he's effectively become the kind of corporate entity his audience was rooting against. The episode then pivots to what all of this might mean for kids and teens media specifically — from the structural problem of COPPA preventing younger audiences from participating in the kind of creative sandpits that made Backrooms possible, to whether Roblox game adaptations like 99 Nights in the Forest could replicate the Minecraft movie moment, to the genuinely exciting question of what happens when this generation of creators starts having kids of their own.

  8. May 28 ·  Video

    What Roblox Sports Data Tells Us About the Next Generation of Fans

    A hosts' deep dive with Andy and Jo, recorded in the middle of a British heatwave with Emily absent. Jo has spent the last six months tracking the top 50 sports games on Roblox daily, and this episode is her five-takeaway breakdown of what that data reveals about how teenage sports fandom actually works — and how far behind most sports organisations are in understanding it. The headline finding is counterintuitive: official, licensed sport consistently underperforms unofficial, developer-originated games on Roblox. The NFL, Premier League, and FIFA all have a presence on the platform; none of them come close to games built from scratch by teenage developers who simply love their sport. Jo's argument is that this isn't just a platform quirk — it's a window into how this generation relates to fandom itself. Volleyball, driven by the anime series Haikyuu, is currently one of the biggest sports categories on Roblox despite being nowhere near football in real-world popularity. Almost every top-performing sports game, across every sport, has an anime aesthetic. And the primary game loop isn't playing the sport — it's hanging out, looking good, and being social with friends. The tribal rituals of going to a match are being replicated in digital space, just dressed differently. The episode is essential listening for anyone in sports media, rights ownership, or brand strategy who is trying to understand where the next generation of fans is actually spending their time — and why turning up on Roblox with broadcast-mode thinking and a calendar of big events is precisely the wrong approach.

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Ratings & Reviews

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out of 5
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About

Kids Media Club Podcast is a podcast hosted by Jo Redfern, Andy Williams, and Emily Horgan. In each episode they chat with a different guest about the world of Kids Media. The podcast covers everything from trends in animation to the rise of Edtech.

Information

  • Creator
    Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    178
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2022 Kids Media Club Podcast
  • Show Website
    Kids Media Club Podcast

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