Boing, a children's channel owned by Warner Bros. Discovery which is home to Clarence, Adventure Time and Dexter's Laboratory basically older shows from Cartoon Network and Cartoonito. It has a boost in popularity despite not residing on MultiChoice's DStv.
Last month, it was confirmed by Warner Bros. Discovery that youth centred action skewed channel Toonami will fold under Warner TV which brought questions to the channel's potential future in the African market.
Toonami was added on Econets defunct Kwése TV alongside Cell C's defunct Black streaming service in 2017. In 2020, it was shortly revived as a pop-up channel on MultiChoice's DStv and was later picked up by StarSat in South Africa alongside StarTimes in the rest of Africa.
During that time, Toonami was one of the leading kids brands at the time for anime like Beyblade, DC heroes like Batman or and Cartoon Network IPs like Ben 10. Over the years, the quality had further diminished with DC building up most of their lineup and anime on limbo.
Despite transitioning to a much wider spectrum in 2021, not much content was added to the channel except for Firestarter and Dragonball Super. The reason I believe this channel could be on the chopping block for consumers in Africa is simple.
Firstly, Warner Bros. Discovery had been eliminating redundancy across their platforms. Before Toonami, there was TCM and the ever successful Boomerang who similar to the channel went through a dry spell with TCM not getting much hype on its performance as seen with Boomerang.
Unlike the latter, it wouldn't seem far fetched if Warner Bros. Discovery opted for existing brand e.g. Boing as opposed to a complete restructure of the channel.
Toonami is regarded as an adult channel but most of the content fit the demographic of Cartoon Network being 7-12 years and also StarTimes still regards Toonami as a kids brand despite the rebrand in 2021 and the only new offering on the channel at the time, Firestarter.
Boing would make a suitable replacement as both leverage on archived material and also Cartoon Network and Cartoonito aren't even seen on the platform. This would be one way to get the content to newer audiences and familiarise them with both brands.
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