The Australian Children’s Content Summit (ACCS) is an annual industry conference held in Coffs Harbour and attended mainly by people working in the children’s television and video streaming businesses, for the most part from Australia.
This was the fourth staging of the ACCS, and there was definitely a different mood at this year’s conference than in previous years.
At this year’s event, there was an overwhelming sense of bonhomie between those attending from traditional legacy media, such as free-to-air TV broadcasters and TV production companies, and those in the video creator economy on the YouTube side of the streaming business.
YouTube Takes Centre Stage
The major sponsor of this year’s event was YouTube, and its presence was front and centre, with lots of conference panels and workshops focusing on how to get the most from YouTube, as well as YouTube laying out how its “High Quality Principles” operate to prioritise quality content for its youngest viewers.
ABC TV also had a large contingent at the conference, as it should, being the only major free-to-air broadcaster in Australia that still commissions, produces, acquires and broadcasts Australian children’s TV programs for Australian children.
ABC Children’s & Family’s big announcement this year, in partnership with BBC Studios, was the establishment of a joint development fund which will hopefully unearth more shows that prove popular around the world, like the amazing success both broadcasters have enjoyed with Bluey.
And that pretty much summed up the ACCS conference – ABC Children’s TV will continue to be the only significant Australian commissioner of long-form live-action and animated TV shows for Australian children, while YouTube is there for producers, small and large, to post content that is inexpensive to make but faces the difficult challenge of being discovered in an online video world filled with endless hours of content of decidedly varying quality.
Who Was Missing?
What was just as interesting at ACCS was who was not in attendance and what was not being discussed.
Netflix did have a small presence at the conference and was the sponsor of an afternoon of barefoot lawn bowls on the opening day. However, Disney, Nickelodeon and Cartoon Network were nowhere to be seen.
Also gone were the politicians rallying behind the Australian children’s TV production industry, which in recent years has been decimated by the Federal Government’s 2022 decision to drop the obligation for Australia’s commercial broadcasters to produce Australian children’s shows for Australian children.
The Collapse of Commercial Kids’ TV
Since commercial TV quotas were dropped, there has been a 95% reduction – yes, a 95% reduction – in the number of Australian children’s shows made by Australian commercial TV broadcasters.
Put simply, Australia’s commercial TV stations no longer make Aussie kids’ shows for Aussie kids.
These are the three broadcasters that once produced Skippy, Here’s Humphrey, Agro, Simon Townsend’s Wonder World, Amazing, Totally Wild, Mortified, Hi-5, Saddle Club, Lah-Lah’s Adventures, H2O, Ocean Girl and The Deep.
So it’s not that Seven, Nine and Ten don’t know how to make good shows for Australian children; they just don’t want to produce them because they cannot make enough money from doing so and would rather serve us up their endless, cheap-to-produce reality TV format shows.
Gone was the Screen Producers Association (SPA), fighting to support the children’s TV production industry – it had fought and pretty much lost that battle the previous year.
SPA celebrated the Federal Government’s decision last year to establish a minimum level of Australian content to be produced by the US streamers, which was actually set at a level lower than what the streamers were already producing – and they call that a win? I don’t.
And the Australian children’s TV producers themselves went quiet this year. Last year, there was a panel of leading Australian children’s TV producers calling for government support to increase the offset for producing children’s TV shows, require the ABC to pay higher licence fees for children’s TV content, and provide them with financial support to meet the necessary additional marketing costs associated with supporting shows on YouTube.
There were no such conversations this year.
Sadly, also gone were quite a few producers of Australian children’s TV shows who have moved out of the business due to the lack of production opportunities and the sad, foreseeable state of the Australian children’s TV industry.
So Where Are We At?
In just three short years at ACCS, YouTube has gone from being a marketing afterthought for Australian producers of traditional long-form TV shows for children to being one of the two main free-to-air outlets for their shows.
YouTube and the Aussie creators who are enjoying great success with their YouTube channels, like Bounce Patrol, The Wiggles, The Mik Maks, Milo & Chip, Emma Memma and Ms Moni, are now welcome and equal participants in the Australian TV and video streaming business, as they should be.
However – and this is a very big however – there is also the harsh reality that the potential commercial return from Made for Children’s content on YouTube comes nowhere near covering the cost of producing long-form narrative live-action or animated children’s programs, which is, after all, what producers of children’s TV programs want to produce.
If the future of making Australian children’s TV and video programs is limited to what ABC TV can afford and what the YouTube algorithm rewards with its small change, then this falls a long way short of what Australian children deserve and what the Australian Government should be requiring commercial TV broadcasters and streamers to produce in our country.
Wide Eyes News from the Tube is written by a leading industry expert and is focused on providing a quick snapshot of the best opportunities in the television & animation market.
This article also appeared in Edition 55 of The Bugg Report Magazine
