The days of posting clips on YouTube in the hope of driving eyeballs to TV are long gone, and producers and distributors in the kids’ content space now have models that make money on the platform.

Once upon a time, Catalan illustrator Roser Capdevila created The Triplets, a set of stories featuring three characters: Anna, Tereza and Helena.

The year was 1983 and the characters were based on Capdevila’s triplet daughters, born in 1969. So successful were the stories that, in 1994, the books were adapted for television by the Catalan public broadcaster, Televisió de Catalunya. The animation spawned more than 100 episodes in 35 languages, a second season and even a spin-off, and like all happy TV content tales, sold all over the world.

But that wasn’t the end of the story, because three decades later the iconic animation is getting a reboot. “We are committed to honouring the legacy of The Triplets while bringing fresh creativity and innovation to this new version of the show,” said Javier Galán, producer at Peekaboo Animation, when it announced last month it had entered into international coproduction agreements with Italy’s Rain Frog and Portugal’s Sardinha em Lata on the new 26×11’ version of the series.

In Spain, the show will have its linear premiere in 2027 via two public kids’ channels, 3Cat’s SX3 in Catalan and RTVE’s Clan nationally. Only after that will it be “available on their respective VoD sites and platforms,” says a representative for Peekaboo.

Meanwhile, Italian broadcaster Rai and Portuguese pubcaster RTP have both committed to local versions of the show. “We’re so thrilled to be part of this amazing project that will bring back such an iconic property in a brand-new animated series,” says Giuseppe Franchi, CEO of Rain Frog. “This show fascinated so many children in the 1990s in Italy, including us, and Rai is the perfect partner to reach the new generations with original stories and unmissable adventures.”

Nuno Beato, producer and CEO of Sardinha em Lata, adds: “Our collaboration in a brand that is already established in the market is very important for the strengthening of the company at an international level, and a significant step in the history of animation production in Portugal.”

We will have to wait a little longer to see how the next chapter in this story reads, but in a kids’ market that is becoming increasingly fragmented and competitive, the reboot is the fairy godmother for a legacy kids sector as it tries to break the spell digital behemoth YouTube is casting on kids everywhere.

Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s and Education, did not mince her words at the start of 2025, when she said the defection of children to online platforms was bringing the global kids TV industry to “its knees.”

What concerns Hidalgo and other execs in the business is not just the haemorrhaging of audiences to YouTube, but the lack of safeguards and the quality of the content when they get there.

As David Kleeman, senior VP of global trends at research firm Dubit, put it recently, when speaking to BBC Radio 4’s The Media Show: “You don’t know when you are watching YouTube if what you are seeing has been vetted by anyone who understands children, who understands the topic, whereas the BBC does such an exceptional job of that.”

Perhaps it’s no surprise then that in this David and Goliath battle, the BBC, like its Catalan and Spanish counterparts, is also pushing the reboot button to win over a new generation of kids – with a little help from their nostalgic parents. Last month, UK kids’ channel CBeebies announced it was bringing back live-action series Balamory, which was originally produced between 2005 and 2006, for two new 10×14’ seasons premiering in 2026.

At the time of the announcement, Kate Morton, head of commissioning for the under-six age group at BBC Children’s and Education, said: “A whole new generation will discover and enjoy Balamory as we bring families together with this new update for CBeebies. It will be a real treat for parents who grew up with the show to now introduce their little ones to the brightly coloured world getting to know a host of old and new characters together.”

Other recently announced reboots in the kids genre include a new animated preschool series based on iconic property Mr Men and Little Miss by French studio Watch Next Media, a revival of the classic stop-motion kids’ series Pingu by UK animation indie Aardman and US toy giant Mattel, and a new season of Pocoyo (52×7’), distributed by Animaj.

Yet even with the trusted reboot, the lure of YouTube to that new generation of kids has become too much to ignore. Animaj, formed in 2022 and based in London, Paris and Madrid, is investing in over 100 minutes of original musical content a year for YouTube and other digital platforms to compliment the main series of its flagship hit.

According to Gregory Dray, co-founder and chief business officer, there’s no place like YouTube to build franchises out of its content. “We are generating close to 15 billion-plus views a year on YouTube with only three owned and operated properties, which makes us the fifth largest kids and family group on the platform and the largest coming from Europe,” he told C21 last year.

It’s not clear yet where the reboot of Pingu will premiere, but last month, Wallace & Gromit producer Aardman announced it had appointed Kenny England to the newly created role of director of digital, social and communities, where he will lead a new integrated digital strategy across Aardman’s social, YouTube and FAST channels, with a focus on digital-first content, the company said.

For new entrants into the kids TV market, such as Miralumo Films, the Brazilian animation studio behind award-winning family-orientated animation short Napo, a digital-first strategy is the only way to go. Two months ago, The Curitiba-based studio launched musical animated kids property Lulumos on YouTube and TikTok, followed by an English-language version in January.

Gustavo Ribeiro, co-founder of Miralumo Films, says retaining the studio’s IP is central to its strategy. “I know a lot of [programme-makers] that don’t even own 1% of their ideas. That doesn’t make sense,” he says.

Miralumo is fully funding Lulumos and – for now anyway – is not looking for a return on its investment in the digital space. “We are putting all the money in, but we have created something really polished without going bankrupt by developing tools and developing processes in order to do the project in a really efficient and smart way,” says Ribeiro.

Such an approach is out of necessity as much as by design, since finding a return on investment from YouTube is the elephant in the room for the industry.

“Sometimes people forget that even if you have billions of views, the amount of money you’re making is not moving the needle,” says Monika Oomen, Warner Bros Discovery (WBD)’s VP of brand, communications and digital content strategy for kids in EMEA. “If you try to create content to generate revenue on YouTube, you’re much more likely to fail because you’re not creating content that the audience wants.”

With a YouTube reach of billions of views a year, however, WBD has fully embraced the platform, and to grow its fan base, is acquiring content from third parties for its YouTube channels. In what is understood to be a first for its Cartoonito YouTube channel, the media company announced last October that it had struck a deal with Canadian distributor Epic Story Media for children’s musical series Clawlolo (26×3′), produced by Cyprus-based Rymanco.

Meanwhile, following a deal signed with distributor Meta Media Entertainment, new Danish hit series Apple Hills, produced by Nice Ninja and coproduced with pubcaster DR, launched last month on the Cartoon Network YouTube channel.

“We are bringing those IPs into our ecosystem,” says Oomen. “The benefit for the production is that it is not having to build the viewership from scratch. We launch it and then we can analyse it and then see how we are recruiting new audiences. That’s a benefit to us, but the production company gets our audience, so that’s a benefit from us.”

But Oomen says YouTube is only part of a wider ecosystem when it comes to its digital strategy. “In essence, you have a piece of content that you want to bring in front of kids and you want them to not only see it, you want them to engage with it and you want them to really love it,” she explains.

“This doesn’t happen, in my experience from the data, just with one platform. So, I think it’s too simplistic to say we all have to run blindly to YouTube. We have to be very clear how important it is, very clear of its power, but we create content. YouTube will take the content to the audience, but we will deliver this high-value and high-quality content.”

Oomen adds that the value provided by YouTube is “first and foremost” discoverability. “It’s the discovery of content that drives awareness and it drives these huge numbers on the reach, but it is part of a wider ecosystem,” the exec says.

That’s certainly the conclusion that Lithuanian public broadcaster LRT has reached. According to Aistė Jūrė, LRT’s head of its children’s and youth content, it has taken a different route to its counterparts and is now producing and acquiring content specifically for its YouTube channels: LRT Vaikai for kids aged two to 11 and LRTU for teens.

“We made a strategic decision to focus on YouTube – a third-party platform – because over 80% of our audience already spends its time there. Our goal is to be where our viewers are,” Jūrė told C21 in December.

For Helen Howells, joint managing director of Hoho Entertainment, the children’s production and rights management company behind kids brand Cloudbabies, the firm’s digital strategy was “a big leap of faith” but has slowly begun to pay dividends.

Hoho, which was launched during the Covid-19 pandemic, brought the management of its Cloudbabies YouTube channels in-house. Howells says: “During the last few years, we’ve really seen that channel build. In fact, we have three Cloudbabies channels, we have an English channel, a Spanish channel and a German channel.”

Combined, the channels are generating between three and four million views a month, says Howells, “all from the original 52 episodes that the company produced 12 years ago.” The company has also launched a successful e-commerce business to sell Cloudbabies merchandise, according to the exec.

Howells believes that alongside working with traditional linear broadcasters internationally, Hoho has found a YouTube business model that works – albeit not one without its problems. “When you’re looking to create new content for an existing IP that has had to raise quite a lot of money in terms of production budget, that comes with challenges, but I think we’re doing it in quite a clever way,” she says.

Citing algorithms as “one of the beauties of YouTube,” Howells says Hoho has been able to make its content even more relevant to its target audience by using YouTube data that is much harder to access in the traditional linear world of TV.

“For example, with Cloudbabies, we know that our USP is storytelling. We know that it’s bedtime, it’s routines,” she explains. “And so, what we’re now looking to do is to develop and create some new content specifically around that theme. It might not necessarily be full episodes, it might be some sort of storytelling content, it might be bedtime lullaby songs, which we can then use across multiple platforms, not just YouTube.”

When it comes to the safety of kids on YouTube, companies such as WBD and Hoho point to their adherence to YouTube’s Made for Kids kitemark, which means, among other things, no targeted adverts and all comments are disabled. “Everything that we publish and produce and put on our channels is all under the Made for Kids banner,” confirms Howells. “We take huge steps to make sure that we protect our audience in the best way that we can.”

Nevertheless, the relentless pull of YouTube and other digital platforms on kids’ attention is reigniting the debate about the safeguards and regulations around children’s content, with some calling for YouTube to contribute to the funding of quality kids programming via a levy.

This chapter in the future of kids programming, just like the reboot of The Triplets, has yet to be revealed, but the looming question for an industry in peril is what part will YouTube play in it?

The days of posting clips on YouTube in the hope of driving eyeballs to TV are long gone, and producers and distributors in the kids’ content space now have models that make money on the platform.

Once upon a time, Catalan illustrator Roser Capdevila created The Triplets, a set of stories featuring three characters: Anna, Tereza and Helena.

The year was 1983 and the characters were based on Capdevila’s triplet daughters, born in 1969. So successful were the stories that, in 1994, the books were adapted for television by the Catalan public broadcaster, Televisió de Catalunya. The animation spawned more than 100 episodes in 35 languages, a second season and even a spin-off, and like all happy TV content tales, sold all over the world.
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