A live recording from MIP Junior in Cannes, with Andy, Emily and Jo grabbing Jon Mason, founder of Jollywise and creator of Stan and Gran, for a conversation that cuts against the grain of most MIP conversations. Instead of talking about how to get a show made, Jon is asking whether the show is the right format at all — and whether the industry is measuring the wrong things entirely.

The provocation at the heart of the discussion is a LinkedIn article Jon wrote questioning whether dwell time and views are sufficient metrics for kids content, at a moment when a World Economic Forum white paper on AI and children is asking the same question from a policy direction. Jon’s argument is that the industry has allowed data that is easy to collect — clicks, completion rates, engagement — to become the only data that matters, when what actually counts is what a child does after the content ends. Whether they go outside, ask a question, make something, explore. That’s much harder to measure, but arguably much more important. Bluey, he notes, are starting to think about exactly this.

• The conversation ranges across screen-free AI products (Mallow, Freckle, Yoto), the gap between the ed-tech world and the kids IP world that MIP could usefully bridge, the risk of AI companions that are permanently available and relentlessly sycophantic, and Jon’s core creative mission with Stan and Gran: getting kids outside. His closing challenge to the room is a good one — does your IP have to be a TV show? And if the answer is yes, are you absolutely sure?

This pre-MIP Junior sponsored episode brings Nicolas Eglau, Managing Director of EMEA, APAC and Global Distribution at Moonbug Entertainment, into conversation with Andy, Emily, and Jo. The timing is deliberate — Moonbug has a lot to talk about heading into Cannes.

Nicolas traces the logic of what he calls Moonbug's reverse distribution model: where traditional studios start with premium pay TV and work their way down to YouTube, Moonbug started on YouTube and has worked its way up — through premium streamers, linear channels in 100-plus markets, consumer products, gaming, live events, and now, with the Cocomelon movie landing in February, theatrical. Owning all of their IP outright is what makes the model work; it means no permissions to seek, no rights to negotiate, and the ability to move from idea to execution in months rather than years. The linear channel launch in the Philippines took five months from concept to air. Emmy's Wonder Wardrobe — a live action Little Angel spin-off built around a character the audience was already asking for — went from data insight to Disney and Netflix in similarly short order.

• The newest announcement is Big Feelings, a music company Moonbug has built to open up its distribution and monetisation infrastructure to third-party artists and creators — with Snoop Dogg and Doggyland among the first partners. It's a bet that what Moonbug has built for its own music-led IP can be valuable to others who have the talent but not the network. The episode closes on the Cocomelon movie, which Nicolas describes as the climax of everything the model has been building toward — and on which he is, emphatically, not scared.

A bonus mini episode from Jo, recorded at the Young Horizons Film Festival in Warsaw — a relatively small but well-curated industry event that she reports punching above its weight. Two conversations captured at cocktail hour, both worth hearing.

First, David Kleeman on why "a good story well told" is no longer enough as a creative ambition. His argument is that kids engage with stories through three fundamental need states — wanting to be involved, wanting to explore freely, and wanting to be part of a community — and that the industry keeps accidentally frustrating all three through IP protectionism, algorithmic curation, and age-gating from social spaces. His closing point is sharp: start with a core, let the audience tell you where they want to go next, and don't try to build everywhere at once.

Then Janine Weigold former Netflix executive now consulting across the industry, on the funding gap that nobody has solved: the space between an early idea and a full commission, where animation in particular keeps falling through the cracks. Her argument is that broadcasters, ad sales teams, and private companies with audience reach could function as incubators — offering channels, expertise, and promotional muscle to help creators find proof of concept before the big platforms come looking. The conversation ends on data sharing, where Janine is unambiguous: platforms hoarding engagement data isn't just bad for the industry, it's preventing the discovery of the next SpongeBob.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.