After Amazon announced its shift away from kids content to focus on co-viewing this past summer, JAM Media took the opportunity to re-evaluate its go-to-market plans.

The Irish prodco is bringing its mixed-media series Jessy & Nessy, co-produced with the streamer, to MIP Junior, with a strategy in place to showcase the series to linear broadcasters for the first time. The series will still premiere on Prime Video, in March 2020, which still holds the SVOD rights.

“The series is a co-production between Amazon Studios and ourselves for Prime, and there was always the plan to do something around linear, but at a later date,” says JAM’s CCO John Reynolds. 

While Amazon is still in the children’s space, there’s no guarantee that it will continue to be longer-term. To build on early excitement for the property and maximize its exposure and reach, JAM opted to scale up earlier than expected, with the goal of getting the series to more kids and possibly selling the format to different regions for localization.

Episodes play out with the live-action character Jessy putting on a pair of magical glasses that allow her to see an animated and mixed-media world, which she can explore alongside her sea-monster friend Nessy. The 40 x 11-minute episodes target a preschool audience (three- to four-years-old, specifically) and is created by JAM’s head of development Chris Dicker and is executive produced by JAM execs John Rice and Alan Shannon. JAM is handling worldwide distribution for the series. 

Inspired by a desire to make glasses a positive thing for kids, the show’s mixed media approach allows it to ground the world of animated characters and puppets in reality through the character of Jessy, who JAM hopes kids will relate to, Dicker says. Turning the series into a format is something the prodco the team is considering as the green-screen makes adapting the format into other countries much easier than building an entire series from the ground up, he adds.