UK trade body Pact has found that there was a spike in overall TV production revenue in 2022—but its latest forecast suggests a decline is underway for 2023, creating a sense of particular uncertainty for kids content.

Pact’s UK Television Production Survey: Financial Census 2023 report, released yesterday, assessed each content genre’s share of overall commissioning spend. Genres like drama, unsurprisingly, dominated with 37% of the total spend (which was around US$2 billion in 2022). Kids content only cornered 2%, remaining flat from 2021. But looking back at previous years’ data, there’s a small but fairly consistent decline. 

From 2009 to 2012, the kids genre represented 4% of total commissioning spend. This figure fell to 3% from 2013 until 2020 (except in 2018, an outlier year when the genre only had a 1% share.) 

Pact estimates that total revenue for the domestic TV industry hit a record-high of US$4.8 billion in 2022, a 21% increase from 2021. This boom was driven by a post-COVID bounceback, according to Pact CEO John McVay, which resulted in an abundance of commissions to make up for the previous two years. A likely consequence of this could be an ongoing decline, says McVay.

“With the cost-of-living crisis, the situation with Ukraine [and] rising inflation, we recognize that 2023 so far has been a much tougher year, and this is likely to be reflected in next year’s census,” McVay noted in a release. 

The report also highlighted a 70% growth in the UK TV industry’s international revenue to US$1.9 billion, driven largely by streamers like Disney+ and Netflix. Notably, Netflix greenlit and launched British teen series Heartstopper (pictured) in April 2022. 

It’s been a challenging few years in the UK as the industry deals with a downturn in kids content investment. The closure of the US$62-million Young Audiences Content Fund last year hit kids creators especially hard. This past March, McVay told Kidscreen that new screen tax reliefs are crucial for the UK “at a time when it’s very hard to raise funds for children’s content.” 

Patricia Hidalgo, director of BBC Children’s and Education, echoed this sentiment today at a media policy conference held by the Westminster Media Forum. According to Deadline, Hidalgo emphasized the lack of funding for kids content and urged the government to provide more initiatives and incentives to support projects with strong cultural relevance to the UK.