Why the kids' sector isn't dead yet

By Colin Williams 18-11-2025

Colin Williams, founder and creative director of Northern Irish animation prodco Sixteen South, discusses how premium, human-produced stories will always have a place in a YouTube dominating, AI content world.

As another week at Mip drew to a close, many of us were pleasantly surprised to come home from Cannes with a tinge of optimism that things might be okay. But the painful reality which will now shadow every market will be the absence of some of our good friends and international colleagues who have recently lost their jobs or their studios. And since we’re a big community, it really hurts.

When I went to my first market, Kidscreen in New York, there were over 2,000 people in the room. It didn’t take me long to realise that each of us were probably pitching two or three ideas to a handful of broadcasters who each had maybe eight to 10 commissioning slots a year. When I worked out the ratio of shows being pitched versus the opportunity for a commission, it worked out at around 0.01% of all shows that were pitched ever making it to screen.

That was 2007. Today there are fewer broadcasters with even fewer slots and even more studios with more ideas. And to get a green light now requires two or three commissions, successfully obtaining soft funding from many sources, advances and production availability all at the same time. Literally, needing all the stars to align at exactly the same time.

At Mip this year, three public broadcasters told me of their own frustrations – they have a huge amount of new show ideas sitting in financing purgatory. All with a commission commitment from them, but also a finance gap so big that just can’t be filled.

Sixteen South’s Coop Troop

In the golden decade of the streamers, our industry grew from the size of a coffee cup to the size of a barrel almost overnight. Huge cheques were being written, we couldn’t find enough animators and many producers enjoyed surfing the streamer wave. But it didn’t last, and now as our industry shrinks to the size of an espresso cup, many studios are becoming casualties and so many of the talent that joined our industry simply won’t find work again. It’s a terrible grim reality.

I heard a fact recently that genuinely shook me: one in five kids in the UK have a mental health concern. That’s a huge increase even over the last 10 years, and it is set to worsen even further.

We are what we consume, and letting our young kids gorge themselves on a diet of YouTube without being careful to curate what they’re watching is so much worse than leaving them in a sweet shop all day long by themselves. What’s popular is not necessarily what’s good for us.

We all know by now that YouTube is the uncatchable juggernaut which has already won the eyes and mental health of our kids. But there is so much there, dressed in bright alluring colours which is just utterly poisonous for their little minds. Like us at Sixteen South, producers (who have actually managed to keep hold of their rights) are thinking about how to give a new home and a bigger audience to some of our older shows on YouTube. It’s actually exciting to try to tip the scales with good shows with wholesome stories. We are what we consume and when our kids consume nutritious content it feeds their minds, making them stronger, healthier and better humans.

But how do we make new and original shows without the backing of public broadcasters, commercial broadcasters or the streamers, solely for YouTube? Let’s be honest, the only two ways are to either convince a willing billionaire to fund that business model or to make stuff for next to nothing which will be equally as worthless. I feel that’s nothing but a race to the bottom.

For years, Coca-Cola has heralded the beginning of the Christmas season when it first airs its famous commercial with the red trucks rolling towards town. I’ve just seen this year’s one, which Coca-Cola boasts has not only once again been made completely using AI, but that even less people were used to make it. And it shows. What was once the spine-tingling feeling of anticipation of the coming of the magical season is now more of a cold shiver down the spine. It is nothing but a soulless piece of crap. What a disappointment. What a shame.

So what’s the answer? As humans, we desire human stories, stories to uplift and encourage us, challenge and entertain us, stories to make us cry, to reach deep inside us and stories that inspire us. We are not going to ever find stories like that made with AI on YouTube. These are the stories we will gladly pay for. There will always be a need for human stories, made by humans, and I believe we will always be willing to pay a premium for those, because we will thirst for them. And the more we’re deprived from them, the more we will need and want them.

We want to be one of the studios that continues to make shows like that and must believe that – whatever the outlets are that people will watch them on – they will exist, whether they continue in the form of linear or digital streaming. Unfortunately, there will be less of us around, but our ambition is to be one of those that survive.