On October 20th, 2004, the Public Broadcasting Service (PBS) announced a partnership with Comcast, HiT Entertainment (now Mattel Creations) and Sesame Workshop to create a new subscription based channel for aimed at children under the age of 4 kind of like Baby TV.
On April 4th, 2005, Comcast announced that the new kids channel would be called PBS Kids Sprout and it launched 6 months later on September 26. At first it launched as an on demand service then it got a channel later.
Unlike PBS Kids, the channel aired adverts however they were minimal and featured products aimed at babies and toddlers. Among the shows to air on the channel were Barney And Friends, Kipper, Pingu, Angelina Ballerina, Boobah, Calliou, Teletubbies and more.
In addition to airing many programming blocks, Sprout did something unique on the channel where it would take several short episodes of a show and combine it into a half hour show of its own complete with interstitials between segments.
2011 to 2013 saw a complex of business decisions that would lead NBC to get full control of the channel.
To summarise, Comcast claimed a 51% share of NBCUniversal at the time leaving them to handle the channel. Apex Partners sold HiT Entertainment to NBCUniversal and claimed their stake in Sprout. Sesame Workshop and PBS solder their share of Sprout forcing PBS to retract PBS Kids from the name by November 2013.
While all of this began in July 2012, Sprout began to run NBC Kids and Mi Telemundo respectively. This was a block that aired Saturday mornings aimed at younger children.
On September 26, 2015, Sprout recieved a refresh.
On May 1st, 2017, since Sprout was owned entirely by NBCUniversal. They announced that the channel would rebrand into Universal Kids and begin airing shows aimed at preteens at primetime hours. They would continue producing original content some from DreamWorks Animation that NBCUniversal purchased in 2016.
Unfortunately this change seemed to negatively impact the channel's viewership. It dropped by 30% in 2017 and a cut of 73% percent in 2018.
In June 2019, to try and recover Universal Kids financially they stopped producing new original content and shifted their focus to acquired series. But still in 2019 they were the lowest viewed channel in the United States with only 31,000 viewers per day luckily the decline dropped to 3%.
So it seems Universal Kids has fallen from its prime in recent years. Why is this?
I believe it is because of the brand change not everyone was familiar with Universal Kids even though it was the same channel. The new changes turned people off the channel. I think they could have slowed the rebrand perhaps add the changes to the lineup and take use of an intermediary name like Universal Sprout.
It seems like Universal Kids is in trouble and I mean soon to be terminated kind of trouble, can they dig themselves out of this?
At the moment, Universal Kids hasn't updated their programming and offers less and less content which often signals the downfall of a brand but with it being ranked the 132nd most watched channel in the United States one would hope but with cable becoming endangered I doubt.
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