Paramount Shutting Down Noggin App; Entire Staff Laid Off

The preschool streamer seems to have had the most concentrated impact from the latest round of 800 across the company

It had only been a couple of weeks since Paramount shut down a majority of their TV Everywhere apps, and now they’re consolidating their preschool streaming service Noggin, shutting it down and moving its original programming to Paramount+. This comes as part of another round of layoffs, of about 800 employees (about 3% of its workforce) just days after CBS and Nickelodeon aired Super Bowl LVIII, which was watched by around a record 123 million people, marking massive ratings success, and this is how they’re rewarded.

The Noggin brand was first introduced in 1999, as a digital cable channel for the same demo. It originally lasted a decade, until the September 2009 rebrand into Nick Jr., before being brought back as the name of a streaming service in 2015 full of more than 1,000 educational games, videos and books in its library, as well as shows from across Nick Jr. history. The SVOD service for kids aged 2 to 7 had 2.5 million global subscribers in 2019, which would be four years into service. The most confusing part of the shutdown is that the app launched Nogginville, an immersive digital world featuring minigames as well as iconic locations from the broader Nickelodeon universe, just launched in December. 

In 2020, Noggin introduced original programming. Along with the third party acquisitions, all non-overlapping long- and short-form video programming will be moved to Paramount+ under the Nick Jr. banner. Noggin will no longer be taking new subscribers, and there will be a transition period for current subscribers. It was almost a year ago that Paramount reportedly explored a sale of a majority stake in Noggin as their priorities and resources shifted even moreso to Paramount+ and Pluto TV. While the layoffs might indicate otherwise, kids and family programming is a still important genre and a crucial component of the company’s streaming subscription-driving strategy, as well as for consumption and repeat viewing, according to a Paramount spokesperson. They said Nickelodeon shows are consistently among the most watched and re-watched on Paramount+. An exact closure date is unknown.

Source: KidScreen