The Electric Company Returns!

The Electric Company - aimed at K6-9 and produced by Sesame Workshop, The Electric Company s going to 'bring us the power' beginning January 2009 on PBS Kids Go!

In the news

YouTube stars may find themselves household names in a posher set of homes in the coming weeks. Tivo announced a long awaited integration with YouTube yesterday, enabling broadband-connected Series 3 or Tivo HD boxes to download YouTube videos to subscribers' big screen TVs beginning this week. Unlike the Unbox or TivoCast services, which download to the hard drive, the videos will be streamed from YouTube servers so they won't clog up your storage. The two companies have worked together to create a user-friendly interface to make navigation of YouTube's massive library of H.264-formatted videos as intuitive as can be expected from the makers of the idiot proof DVR. Select videos by featured videos, most recent, most viewed or top rated. Pause, fast forward and rewind using the Tivo remote. An informational screen allows you to search by title or artist or select works from the same publisher.
 
Web 2.0 learning platform for kids and parents Kidthing announced an agreement to offer a collection of classic children's songs and musical videos from the Wee Sing collective, created by Authors Pam Beall and Susan Nipp.
 

Mediamark Research & Intelligence's (MRI) new 2008 American Kids Study

We all know that more and more kids use the internet to find out more about TV shows, movies, toys and products they see in ads.  According to Mediamark Research & Intelligence's (MRI) new 2008 American Kids Study, 43% of kids 6-11 visited a website they saw or heard about in a commercial or ad. Of the approximately 10.7 million kids who reported visiting a company's site after seeing it in an ad, it is the older kids who are more likely to actually to go to that specific site: K6-7 (26.5%); K8-9 (33.3%); and K10-11 (40.2%); gender-wise it is almost even, with boys slightly higher.  The study was conducted with about 5,000 kids via an in-home survey, as well as a separate survey of primary caregivers in those same households focusing on the kid's purchase in influence activities. Additionally, kids who say they visited a site after seeing/hearing about it in an ad/commercial are more likely (%) than the average US kid to:
Use the internet every day (48%)
Have a personal email address (41%)
Parents let them go anywhere they want online (40%)
Use instant messaging (IM) (40%)
Downloaded music in the last month (34%)
Downloaded a TV show in the last month (29%)

Sprout's pre-school musical

Sprout, the 24/7 preschool kids and parent targeted offering on TV, on-demand and online, debuts Sprout Preschool Musical ... On a Stick, on Christmas Eve, December 24 at 5:30p.  Set inside a pop-up book, the 30-minute musical features all of Sprout's on-air talent (as stick puppets) as they make their way through a holiday snowstorm to The Sprout Sharing Show Theater in time for the Very Very Extraordinary, Merry Musical Sproutacular.  The show is followed at 6p about by the network's 11-hour Snooze-A-Thon, which we told you about last week.  More about the special including songs and activities (make your own puppet on a stick) coloring pages, go to www.sproutonline.com.

Sesame Street mobile and other multi-platform news

Sesame Workshop launches the new short-form preschool series, Sesame Street English (26x2), at Mipcom.  The phonic-centric series features anime style adaptations of the Sesame Street Muppets, with each episode focusing on one letter, sound, and word employing visual and rhythmic aides.  Sesame Street English is part of an overall project that encourages early English proficiency, and which includes 26 Sesame Street English video lessons comprised of live-action and Sesame Street segments available on multiple platforms.  Organized around four topics, reading readiness, math concepts, nature/health exploration, and 'the world around me,' the Sesame Street English lessons also come with outreach materials for parents in their native language and a 'magic pen,' which will let kids choose segments, play games or sing songs that underline the language lesson

Multiplatform kids programmer Kabillion singed a deal with ad management system BlackArrow to deploy its video advertising platform within its broadband and VOD content. The BlackArrow system dynamically contracts, targets, traffics and reports on advertising inventory to maximize revenues from ad-supported video programming.

Dr. Alice Wilder is appointed Chief Content Officer, Kidos.  Wilder will help research and design the core Kidos interface for kids 3-7, as well as produce custom educational and entertainment content across subjects including science, culture and foreign languages.  Wilder helped lead the research team on the preschool series Blue's Clues as well as Super Why!, the latter of which she was a co-creator.

Some news we've been following

A new study by Children Now, a non-partisan research and advocacy group, finds that only one in eight kid's educational TV programs meet high educational standards.  The study, entitled Educationally/Insufficient? An Analysis of the Educational Quality & Availability of Children's E/I Programming, looked at a total of 120 episodes across 40 program titles, then evaluating each show on a range of educational criteria that are associated with kid's learning from TV.  According to the study, "kids are being short-changed by broadcasters," as "few broadcasters offer more than the bare minimum of programming and confine their entire E/I schedule to one or two days of the week, " and that "more than one-quarter of E/I shows model harmful violent or socially aggressive behavior," and furthermore, "the vast majority of programs contain no basic academic or health-related lesson."  A similar study conducted in the 1990s found that between 20-30% of E/I programs were rated as 'highly educational.'  The current study singled out PBS (PBS Kids and PBS Kids Go!) as delivering educational programming that rated "significantly higher" than E/I shows on commercial stations, specifically pointing to the emphasis on cognitive-intellectual lessons on PBS kid-targeted programs.  Conversely, E/I programming on commercial channels focused more on emotional lessons.

Sesame Street is following young kids to digital platforms. The non-profit educational programmer announced new distribution points on iTunes, YouTube and Hulu: under an expanded deal with iTunes, 12 full-length episodes from Sesame Street's record 35th season are now available on iTunes for $1.99/each; the show's YouTube channel (http://www.youtube.com/SesameStreet) offers more than 100 clips; and a new channel on Hulu also offers 100+ clips including 30+ celebrity segments. In addition, the Workshop was awarded a Google Grant  a donation program awarding free AdWords advertising to select charitable organizations. When Google users search on keywords related to Sesame Workshop an ad will appear next to relevant search results.

This week marks Sesame Workshop's launch of a new interactive website for its animated series Pinky Dinky Doo at www.pinkydinkydoo.com.  The Pinky Dinky Doo website sit is aimed at K4-7 and their caregivers and offers a range of games, videos, podcasts and printable activities featuring storylines for the second season of the series, as well as a chance for users to create their own stories, which could be featured as user generated podcasts on the site.  The second season of Pinky Dinky Doo airs on Noggin in the US, CBeebies in the UK and Discovery Kids Latin America.

Very early character artwork for Eartha

Uri, the math widget, helps out with homework.

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