Universal Kids Is Shutting Down In March
Cable television continues to transform as Comcast’s spun-off assets cut dead weight
Remember Chiller? Cloo? G4? Style Network? Esquire Network? NBC Sports Network? Well it’s time to add another fallen channel to the list of NBCUniversal’s cable portfolio and this time it’s Universal Kids, and it’s happening sometime around March 6.
Something was first up when a drop notice was given by Spectrum. It was a rather bare bones notice but it got the job done. The network was launched in 2005 as PBS Kids Sprout, as a joint venture between PBS, Comcast, Sesame Workshop, and HIT Entertainment, effectively replacing the original 24-hour PBS Kids Channel. It became the American home of The Wiggles after Playhouse Disney launched Imagination Movers. The network was meant to compete with Disney Junior and Nick Jr. in the children’s programming space. However, Universal Kids struggled to build a viewerbase in a competitive market that only grew more competitive with the rise of streaming services like Netflix and Disney+. The name shortened to Sprout in 2013, after Comcast, the parent company of NBCU, acquired a full ownership stake in the network. They had slowly been buying out shares for about 2 years to that point. The rebrand to Universal Kids came in 2017.
The network had dabbled with original programming, with a Where’s Waldo? series from corporate sibling DreamWorks Animation and Junior versions of American Ninja Warrior, but original programming was very quickly dropped, and Waldo? became a Peacock original for its second season in 2020. If anything, Universal Kids was a linear haven for the original DreamWorks Dragons series (the one comprised of Riders and Race to the Edge seasons) as well as other early DWA Netflix series like Trolls: The Beat Goes On!, DinoTrux, Home: Adventures with Tip & Oh, All Hail King Julien, The Adventures of Puss in Boots and The Mr. Peabody & Sherman Show. Now, it’s a lot of Floogals, Cocomelon and Masha and the Bear. The onset of streaming expansion between 2019 and 2021 with not only Disney+ and Peacock, but Max, and Paramount+ was definitely a death blow as 30% of Universal Kids’s viewerbase was lost by the end of 2017, 73% by the end of 2018. Average network primetime ratings last year ranked Universal Kids as the third-to-last rated kids network, with only 20,000 viewers. It beat Disney XD and Discovery Familia (Spanish Discovery Family), but was still beaten by Boomerang, TeenNick, and English Discovery Family.
It’s a level of viewership that’s too small to be worth carrying as Comcast spins off nearly its entire cable portfolio including USA Network, CNBC, MSNBC, E!, Golf Channel, Oxygen, and Syfy. And it would sure be hard to be called Universal Kids after being cut off from Universal. It’s part of a larger strategy by NBCUniversal to streamline its operations and focus on profit. The spinoff will take around one year to complete. We’ll see how the NBC-branded channels live on in these circumstances but clearly it made most sense to just shut down, which will be happening around March 6, something also confirmed by cable provider the Margaretville Telephone Company.
Sources: CordCuttersNews, CNSchedules (1, 2)