Hasbro / Discovery Announce Joint Kid's Cable Venture

Longtime family entertainment and toy company Hasbro, Inc. has entered into what could be a rather powerful joint venture with the children's TV programming arm of Discovery Communications. Combining their resources in individual brand development, industry research, and television program production, Hasbro and Discovery will enter the cable television spectrum with a specialized kid's cable network in late 2010. This new television network has a wide variety of new projects in development, making quick use of the intellectual and creative capital the new 50/50 partnership brings.

Essentially re-branding Discovery Kids (new name yet to be determined), and hoping to reach approximately 70 million viewers when all is said and done, Hasbro's buy-in to Discovery Communication's children's/family entertainment network could provide an interesting sequence of creative openings for the independent content production community, animated or otherwise. After more than a dozen years, Discovery Kids will encounter its most drastic revitalization yet. But for all of the lofty projections that follow, one must keep in mind Discovery Kids' remarkable collapse in total viewership in recent years in addition to the threat of turning off parents and/or caretakers with the thought of having a toy company as an influential managing partner for a family network

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"This joint venture reinforces Discovery's strategy to develop strong brands, maximize the potential of our extensive distribution in the U.S. and work with the highest quality content partners to create long-term value," David Zaslav, President and CEO of Discovery Communications, stated.

"The combined assets of both partners provide a compelling platform for building a trusted children's destination that engages and enlightens a thirsty and growing audience."

For a reported $300 million, Hasbro will take a 50% stake in the new cable effort.

No longer just catering to a young audience's hit and miss interest in history, the physical sciences, and natural exploration, the new channel will exclusively target children aged Tween (9-14) and under, mixing previous Discovery Kids programming with a frequent dash of fresh new titles produced by Hasbro's newly established "consumer-driven content" creation team. The agreement now continues through its final stages of approval, and the re-branded channel is currently set to launch in late 2010. Each company will have equal representation on a board of directors that will oversee a management team responsible for programming, scheduling, and operations.

Operational breakdown is as follows: Discovery will be responsible for advertising sales services and distribution; Hasbro will be responsible largely for studio-produced programming. Hasbro's programming at present is a planned cohesion of children's entertainment and content derived from broader, family-friendly brands. This is likely to cooperate with some of Discovery's own, internal efforts. The new network will face many challenges in trying to break into the large and competitive world of kid's cable programming, one of which is devising a proposed balance between whimsical fun, and solid, educational content.

While Hasbro, Inc. revs up its development slate for live-action and animated titles based on many of its hottest selling brands -- new projects are in the works for My Little Pony, G.I. Joe, Tonka, Transformers, a Stretch Armstrong film, various brands from game developer Electronic Arts, and several others; it is certainly not lost on Discovery Communications to leave many of its best titles in the dark -- popular series such as Tutenstein, Peep and the Big Wide World, and others -- will remain after the re-branding. Whether Discovery's new West Hollywood production group, Discovery Studios, which opened its doors just recently, will play an active role in developing, pitching, and producing content for the new Kids channel, has not yet been announced.