Kids Media Club Podcast

Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • 5.0 (6)
  • Entertainment News
  • Updated Weekly

Podcast meets industry water-cooler. We host weekly conversations with producers, animators, media analysts, game designers and the toy brands shaping what young audiences and consumers watch and play - co-hosted with a rotating cast of friends from the Kids Media industry.

  1. 3d ago ·  Video

    Business of Children's Media Summit Announced, and Jeffrey Katzenberg on AI and the Soul of Hollywood

    Jo is absent again, so Andy and Emily have a two-topic episode: first, the announcement of the Business of Children's Media Summit, taking place November 12th in Dublin; then a deep dive into Jeffrey Katzenberg's viral essay on AI and the future of animation. Dennis Crushall from Precisify joins briefly to help launch the summit, which Emily has been quietly building for months in partnership with Cultural and Creative Industries Skillnet. Taking place at the Alex Hotel in Dublin, the day-long event is focused on going direct to audience — YouTube, gaming, consumer products, and franchise strategy — and features keynote speaker Erica Quinn, Director of Kids and Family Consumer Insights at Disney, alongside BBC Children's and Education's Anna Taganov. Tickets are €75 via Eventbrite, and there will be a live podcast recording on the day. Emily has also promised a pint of Guinness to every international attendee, a commitment Andy intends to make very expensive. The second half is a sharp dissection of Katzenberg's 2,000-word Twitter essay positioning AI as the next Toy Story moment for Hollywood — expansive rather than destructive, with tech providing the tools and Hollywood providing the soul. Andy's most interesting observation is around the John Philip Sousa parallel Katzenberg draws: the real fight may not be about the technology at all, but about copyright compensation — and studios sitting on vast IP libraries, including the newly merged Paramount-Warner entity, could stand to benefit significantly if the law catches up. The episode closes on a fittingly ironic note: someone ran the essay through an AI checker and it came back 60% AI-generated. 🎟️ Get your tickets for the Business of Children's Media Summit: https://www.eventbrite.ie/e/the-business-of-childrens-media-summit-tickets-1998215489319 📊 Explore Precisify's research and reports: https://www.precisify.com/reports-and-playbooks

    Business of Children's Media Summit Announced, and Jeffrey Katzenberg on AI and the Soul of Hollywood

  2. Sep 24 ·  Video

    Paramount Warner Merger, Digital-First Animation, and Why YouTube Alone Is No Longer Enough

    Jo is thwarted by internet gremlins this week, so Andy and Emily press on without her. The Paramount-Warner merger has just cleared another significant regulatory hurdle — the California Attorney General's objections melted away after some well-timed brinkmanship — and Emily makes the case that from a kids media perspective specifically, a third major studio entity with the combined IP weight of Warner and Paramount is a genuinely good thing for the landscape. The question of whether the merged studio pulls its content from Netflix the way Disney did is examined, and Emily's read is that it won't be as extreme — but there are strategic decisions to be made around SpongeBob and other core franchises that will be worth watching closely. The second half of the episode is a sharp conversation about digital-first animation and what it actually takes to make the model work. Sheriff Labrador's Baby Bus app background, Danny Go's live show operation, Ms. Rachel's multi-revenue approach — Emily's argument is that the YouTube-to-streaming pipeline is real but narrowing, and that the creators coming through now need to be running multi-line businesses from the start rather than betting the farm on YouTube revenue alone. It's a more structurally difficult proposition than the bubble moment that produced the current wave of creator IP, and the volume of new entrants who can pull it off is likely to be smaller going forward.

  3. Sep 17 ·  Video

    Kids Media Club on the Netflix Kids Report

    t's Netflix report week, and Emily is in the Mastermind chair as Andy and Jo work through the findings of the latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report. The big headline: Cocomelon has dropped out of the top 10 for the first time — a landmark moment for a show that, during the pandemic, was delivering engagement numbers the platform has never seen since. The animated series rankings have stabilised into a consistent top three for the first time — Paw Patrol, Gabby's Dollhouse, and Peppa — with Teen Titans Go and SpongeBob making notable moves once US windows opened. Ms. Rachel's arrival in the top 10 is flagged as the biggest series development of the past year, and The Creature Cases gets its regular Emily mention as the quietly grinding Netflix original that still isn't getting the industry attention it deserves. The report also covers live action series for the first time, where Nickelodeon is doing particularly well, and there's a substantive conversation about the YouTube creator pipeline and what exclusivity actually means for kids content on Netflix. Netflix Playground, gaming, and the platform's decision to remain ad-free on kids content even for subscribers on the ad tier round out the episode.

  4. Sep 15 ·  Video

    Breaking News: Netflix Ends Skydance Animation Partnership — What It Means for the Animated Movie Pipeline

    A short emergency bonus episode with Emily, Andy, and Jo, recorded in real time as news breaks during Netflix report week. The Skydance Animation partnership with Netflix is coming to an end — and Emily has thoughts. She walks through the arc of the deal, from its origins with Apple through the flip to Netflix, and makes the case that the timing makes sense: the Paramount-Warner merger consolidating means Skydance Animation has a natural new home in that pipeline. There's one more Skydance Netflix movie still to come — a Jack and the Beanstalk project — before the partnership winds down, and a fairy-tale themed musical called Steps lands around Thanksgiving this year. The bigger question Emily leaves hanging is what Netflix now does with its animated movie pipeline, given it's been publicly chasing Disney-level animation ambition for years and just lost a key supplier. The silver lining she spots: independent animated movies grinding through theatrical release — Chicken Hare gets a namecheck — may suddenly find their streaming window conversations getting a lot more interesting.

  5. Sep 10 ·  Video

    Band Back Together: Australia Debrief, the Social Media Ban Debate, and Why Kids Audiences Are More Valuable Than Anyone Admits

    The full trio are back in the room for the first time since the summer, and the episode opens with Emily's debrief from the Australian Children's Content Summit in Coffs Harbour — the warmth of the welcome, the flash mob at karaoke, and the more substantive observation that Australia has quietly built one of the richest kids YouTube creator ecosystems anywhere in the world. Bounce Patrol, Ms. Moni, Mikmax, Milo and Chip — the names keep coming, and Emily's point is that Screen Australia's own content hours reports aren't counting any of it. The sharpest line from the Australia trip comes via Tina Harris of Lah-Lah Productions, whose framing of the divide between "creatives" and "creators" as a language problem rather than a values problem landed well on Emily's panel — and the consensus is that the ACCS is ahead of most conferences in actually putting both sides in the same room and letting them learn from each other. The second half of the episode turns to the social media ban debate, which the trio are increasingly sceptical of — not because the concerns aren't real, but because banning access is being treated as a solution to what is fundamentally an algorithm problem. Jo's point that kids who get their understanding of the world from social media, and then discuss it around the dinner table, might actually be doing something more valuable than watching the 10 o'clock news is the episode's most provocative and worth sitting with. The closer is a reminder — via the WildBrain conversation — that kids are among the most commercially valuable audiences that exist, and that the industry has been too apologetic about making that case.

  6. Sep 3

    Live from the Australian Children's Content Summit: The State of Australian Kids Media — with Jenny Buckland, Suzanne Ryan, and More

    Emily has travelled to Coffs Harbour for the Australian Children's Content Summit, and this episode is her dispatches from the ground — a series of short, sharp conversations captured across the event with some of the key figures shaping Australian kids content right now. First up is Jenny Buckland, CEO of the Australian Children's Television Foundation, who gives the clearest account of what happened to the Australian kids content industry when commercial broadcaster quotas were dropped in 2020 — and why the timing, colliding with the global streaming disruption, hit harder here than almost anywhere else. Then Suzanne Ryan, founder of both the ACCS itself and SLR Productions, on why she started the summit out of post-Covid isolation and producer fellowship — and why it landed at 260 attendees when she was hoping for 60. The episode also features a conversation with Barbara Stephens from Flying Bark Productions, whose studio is navigating the shift from traditional commissioning to digital-first IP development — including the freshly launched Doom Sweeper music video, which crossed 3 million YouTube views in its first weeks — and the argument that proof of concept is now proof of audience. As well as a discussion with Tina Harris, Co-Founder of Lah-Lah Productions. The thread running through all of it is the same one dominating kids media conversations everywhere: the traditional funding model is gone, the YouTube creator economy is thriving alongside it, and the most interesting opportunity right now is in the conversation between those two worlds.

  7. Aug 27 ·  Video

    How Bonkers Toys Built a Business on Digitally Native IP — with Lisa Wright and Julie Splendoria

    Emily is still in Australia, so Andy and Jo continue their deep dive into the toy industry with two guests from Bonkers Toys — Lisa Wright, Head of Licensing, and Julie Splendoria, VP of Marketing. It's a conversation that traces the arc from Slither.io and JoJo Siwa's bow to the present day, and makes a compelling case that Bonkers saw the YouTube-to-toy-aisle pipeline coming before almost anyone else in the industry. The origin story is a good one: Bonkers' CEO spotted the opportunity literally from the driver's seat on the school run, watching his kids obsess over Slither.io on their phones, and moved fast enough to be the first licensee on Ryan's World when YouTube creator toys were still being dismissed by retailers as a niche fluke. Lisa and Julie walk through how the team reads fandom — the science of views and subscriber growth, and the harder-to-quantify art of emotional hook and community intensity — and how that methodology has evolved as the landscape shifted from YouTube to TikTok to Roblox. The "playable props" strategy developed for Toys and Colors — seeding supersized versions of toys into content nine months before retail launch — is a standout example of how to build familiarity authentically rather than just blasting product placement. The episode closes with a Q4 outlook: unboxing and blind box collectibles, the ongoing Squishies evolution, sports trading cards, and the PopMart-influenced kidult trend are all flagged as the ones to watch heading into the holiday period. Whatnot gets a mention as a platform to take seriously. And Jo reveals she's been holding a Pokémon card the whole time.

  8. Aug 20

    Paw Patrol's Record Opening, the Bluey Movie Teaser, Coco 2, and Oswald the Lucky Rabbit — Andy and Jo's Trailer Roundup

    Emily is somewhere over the Middle East en route to Australia, so Andy and Jo have been let loose on the podcast control desk — new buttons and all. The result is a slightly more multimedia episode than usual, with trailers played in and reacted to in real time, and a genuinely good conversation about what the summer's animation slate says about where the industry is heading. Four things get the treatment. Paw Patrol: The Dino Movie has just posted the franchise's strongest opening weekend ever — $20 million domestically, $69 million worldwide — and Andy and Jo make the case that the trailer reveals a show that has genuinely grown into itself, with sharper animation, better timing, and writers who clearly love the world. The Bluey movie teaser gets an equally warm reception, with Andy's observation that it chooses a falling balloon as its centrepiece moment — the smallest thing enlarged into the biggest thing — landing as the episode's neatest critical point. Coco 2 prompts the more sceptical conversation: both Andy and Jo loved the original precisely because it felt complete, and the worry is that a sequel risks casting a shadow over something people remember with real tenderness. The Pixar slate discussion that follows — one original, Coco 2, an Incredibles spinoff — raises the question of whether the studio is in a defensive crouch. Oswald the Lucky Rabbit rounds things off: Disney reviving a century-old pre-Mickey character in a hybrid live action and hand-drawn animation style, which Andy and Jo read as both a smart copyright play and a meaningful reconnection with Disney's hand-drawn heritage.

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Ratings & Reviews

5
out of 5
6 Ratings

About

Podcast meets industry water-cooler. We host weekly conversations with producers, animators, media analysts, game designers and the toy brands shaping what young audiences and consumers watch and play - co-hosted with a rotating cast of friends from the Kids Media industry.

Information

  • Creator
    Jo Redfern, Andrew Williams, & Emily Horgan
  • Years Active
    2021 - 2026
  • Episodes
    192
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2022 Kids Media Club Podcast
  • Show Website
    Kids Media Club Podcast

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