My Nick Jr. personalizes TV — and it smells like Netflix
If you’ve got kids, you’re probably well-acquainted with Nickelodeon programming. Not just Nickelodeon, but Nicktoons, TeenNick, and Nick Jr. for the pre-school set. Well, soon you can add My Nick Jr. to that roster. It’s an interactive channel that will allow parents to customize their kids’ viewing experience.
Here’s how it will work. You can program your kids’ TV channel to only play certain Nick Jr. shows –think Dora the Explorer –or shows about certain themes, like problem solving or friendship.
“After each episode, the child would be asked to rate the show,” says Verizon spokesman Bill Kula. “And if no action were taken then the next episode would begin.”
My Nick Jr. is pretty much a direct response to the way streaming services like Pandora, Netflix and Amazon are changing media consumption.
Paul Sweeney of Bloomberg Industries says people are getting used to viewing programming, “When they wanna watch it, where they wanna watch it, and on whatever device they want to watch. No longer are consumers content to simply watch programming as scheduled by an existing network.”
Brad Adgate of Horizon Media says customized channels like My Nick Jr. are the wave of the future. But he has a warning.
“Not only can this endeavor hurt rivals like Disney, who’s probably their biggest rival, and Cartoon Network, but it’s also something that could cannibalize Nickelodeon themselves,” Adgate says.
That’s because little kiddos might abandon old Nickelodeon channels for the interactive — and now ad-free — My Nick Jr.. Adgate says that could hurt ratings and decrease advertising revenue for the old school channels of the Nickelodeon family.
My Nick Jr. has already debuted in France. Verizon’s FIOS TV service will make the new channel available to its customers in the U.S. within a few months.
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