Kids prefer TV for their viewing

New generation love other devices

NEW YORK, April 17, (Agencies): Grace Ellis has never known a time when you needed a TV to watch TV.

The North Attleboro, Massachusetts, fifth-grader watches shows like “Liv and Maddie,” ‘’Jessie” and “The Lodge” on her laptop, iPad and phone.

“Sometimes I watch TV in the car,” she says. “I have ballet every day, so I watch on the way.”

She has a TV in her bedroom that isn’t hooked up to cable but is perfect for watching DVDs. And the family’s flat-screen has advantages of its own. “It’s much bigger,” Grace explains, “and on the couch, it’s comfier.”

Ever since freckle-faced puppet Howdy Doody ushered in children’s television nearly 70 years ago, each new generation of viewers has been treated to a growing bounty of programs on a mushrooming selection of gadgetry.

But nothing compares to the current wave: “The generation coming up now is used to having everything at their fingertips,” says Stacey Lynn Schulman, an analyst at the Katz Media Group.

Why not? From birth, theirs has been a world of video digitally issuing from every screen. And for them, any of those screens is just another screen, whether or not you call it “TV.”

“When they love a (show), they love it in every form and on every platform,” says Nickelodeon president Cyma Zarghami.

This keeps the bosses at each kids’ network scrambling to make sure that wherever children turn their eyes, that network’s programing will be there.

Even so, it may be surprising that children nonetheless watch most television on, well, a television. As in: old-fashioned linear, while-it’s-actually-airing telecasts.

A new Nielsen study finds that in the fourth quarter of 2016, viewers aged 2-11 averaged about 17 hours of live (not timeshifted) TV each week. Granted, that’s a drop of about 90 minutes weekly from the year before. But by comparison, kids in fourth quarter 2016 spent about 4- hours weekly watching video content on other devices.

“Linear TV is still the lion’s share of where kids’ time is spent,” says Jane Gould, senior vice president for consumer insights for Disney Channel. “But it’s important for us to be in all the OTHER places where they are, as well.”

One reason: Those other outlets can pave the way for a new program’s arrival on linear TV.

Gould points to “Andi Mack,” an ambitious young-adult comedy-drama that debuted on Disney Channel on April 7. Weeks before it landed there, the series could be sampled on digital platforms including the Disney Channel app, Disney.com, Disney Channel YouTube, iTunes, Amazon and Google Play.

Count Grace Ellis among the legions of kids whose attention was snagged by this mega-buildup. When “Andi Mack” premiered, Grace was one of the 9 million TV viewers who tuned in.

When “Sesame Street” premiered on PBS back in 1969, it joined a bare handful of TV shows (chief among them “Captain Kangaroo” and “Mr. Rogers’ Neighborhood”) devoted to uplifting their young audience.

Nearly a half-century later, “Sesame Street” is going strong.

security cordon at Huairou, and the wind blowing white lint from the poplar trees that surround the city.

As well as a spectacular

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permanent theater, the far-flung Beijing suburb is home to China Film Group’s studio complex, and the opening events briefly crimped

“PBS is still at its core,” says Sesame Workshop COO Steve Youngwood. So is TV overall, as demonstrated by the series expanding to HBO a year ago. TV currently accounts for 40 percent of its viewership.

But “Sesame Street” has never stopped adapting to an evolving media landscape that today finds 18 percent of its audience viewing on tablets, 14 percent on mobile phones and 25 percent on other streaming devices and computers.

That includes YouTube, where its program content has been a presence for some time. Now it’s getting special focus with the launch of Sesame Studios, which Youngwood describes as “a separate production unit specifically for that platform. We want to harness the power of YouTube to educate kids just like we harnessed the power of TV 50 years ago.”

A half-century ago “streaming video” was an unimagined wonder. But today’s TV landscape has been upended by this technology, and by major streaming-video outlets like Hulu, Amazon and Netflix as they aggressively vie for kids’ (as well as everybody else’s) attention.

Netflix famously doesn’t disclose viewership figures. But according to Andy Yeatman, director of global kids content, “About half of our members around the world watch kids’ content on a regular basis. So it’s a very large, engaged audience.

“Between new and returning series last year, we added 35 new seasons of kids’ originals,” he says. Similar expansion is projected this year.

In a bygone era with just a handful of TV channels, kids could count on finding shows aimed at them only on Saturday mornings and weekday afternoons.

Nickelodeon’s Zarghami pegs 2013-14 as the most recent turning point for kids TV, “when the landscape seriously shifted,” she says, with streaming-video-on-demand providers gaining a real foothold and supplemental devices like tablets and mobile taking off.

Today, Nick has six on-demand platforms, “and we went from 500 new episodes in a season to close to 700 this season,” she says.

In short, kids are flooded with just-for-them content from every direction. But even that’s not enough.

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Sony’s PlayStation Vue internet TV service later this month will add esportsTV, from competitive-gaming event producer ESL — the first 24-hour linear television network in the US dedicated to the genre.

Will the new channel really move the needle for either PS Vue or ESL? It’s hard to see how it will appeal to anyone other than hardcore eSports nerds, given the plethora of free competitivegaming content already available on Twitch, YouTube and other platforms. Note that ESL last month inked a nonexclusive pact with Twitter, which plans to live-stream some 1,500 hours of eSports programming in 2017 under the deal.

ESL’s EsportsTV will be part of PlayStation Vue’s top-tier Elite ($55 per month) and Ultra ($75 monthly) packages. The channel’s launch is expected in time for the first stop on the Intel Extreme Masters tour, IEM Sydney, which begins on May 4 in Sydney, Australia. The ESL-produced IEM series features “CounterStrike: Global Offensive,” “StarCraft II” and “League of Legends” tournaments at venues worldwide throughout the year.

the filming schedule of Zhang Yimou’s upcoming “Shadow.”

Films will play across the Chinese capital for the next week (April CORSIER-SUR-VEVEY, Switzerland, April 17, (AFP): Six hundred and sixty-two people on Sunday set a world record for the biggest gathering of Charlie Chaplins, each donning the black jacket, shoes, bowler hat, toothbrush moustache and cane of the comic’s signature creation, the Little Tramp.

The unusual rally, drawing Chaplin fans of all ages from all over Europe, took place at a museum dedicated to the artist at his former home in Corsier-sur-Vevey, western Switzerland.

16-23). They will compete for eyeballs with “The Fate of the Furious,” which broke records this weekend in commercial theaters. (RTRS)

LOS ANGELES:

James Gray, director of “The Lost City of Z,” which opens this weekend, said that what first drew him to the story was its undercurrent of class striving.

Set in Edwardian England, it focuses on Percy Fawcett (Charlie Hunnam), whose family name has been tarnished by his father’s misdeeds, and he sets out to become a world famous explorer. His obsession becomes the search for a legendary lost civilization in the Amazon, which he never finds.

The project went through years in development, and Gray says that his perspective even changed.

“Then as the movie took a long time get made, what I began to see is the encroaching nationalism and the creeping racism, really, and I decided to delve into that as much as I could for the movie, because it was certainly there — Edwardian England, as it is today,” he says, referring to the rise of Donald Trump, Brexit, and other movements. (RTRS)