By Andrew Tracy

This is the first in a two-part feature from Kidscreen‘s sister publication Playback on the state of the kids TV sector in Canada. 

On November 19, key figures from the Canadian children and youth audiovisual industry gathered at the CBC’s Glenn Gould Studio in Toronto for the annual Youth Media Alliance (YMA) Conference, at a time when the kids content sector is undergoing drastic changes.

One of the most pressing of those changes was addressed in a closing statement from YMA co-presidents Athena Georgaklis and Maria Kennedy, in which they eulogized the closure of several Canadian kids linear channels—the suite operated by Toronto’s WildBrain, and Corus Entertainment’s Nickelodeon, Disney XD, Disney Jr., La Chaine Disney and ABC Spark.

“We honor the channels that built our industry, the ones that took risks, nurtured talent and gave Canadian kids a place to belong,” said Kennedy. “At the same time, we look ahead with courage and with curiosity, because if the past taught us anything, it’s that this industry thrives when it adapts and dreams boldly.”

Farewell to Family Channel
WildBrain announced in August that it would be shutting down Family Channel, Family Jr., WildBrainTV and Télémagino, after it failed to reach carriage agreements for the channels with Canadian mediacos Bell Media and Rogers Sports & Media. 

That conclusion came on the heels of the CRTC (Canada’s broadcasting regulatory body) ruling against WildBrain in complaints the company had filed against both mediacos, arguing that the carriers were putting WildBrain’s kids channels at a disadvantage in favor of foreign and domestic competitors. The commission determined that neither Bell or Rogers were violating their regulatory obligations or giving other services undue advantage.     

“The decisions by Bell and Rogers to drop the channels left WildBrain with no choice but to close our television business,” said WildBrain president and CEO Josh Scherba in a statement to Playback Daily. The company had in fact reached an agreement to sell the channels to Halifax-based children’s studio IoM Media Ventures in December 2024, which was made moot once the carriage deals collapsed.

The loss of the nearly 40-year-old Family Channel brand is both a symbolic and material blow to those in the space, even those who have found success with international buyers.

“Without WildBrain’s channels, there might not have been a home for Canadian shows like Life with Derek or Ruby and the Well…having that Canadian platform [was important] in launching our shows globally,” says Shaftesbury chairman and president Christina Jennings, citing two of the prodco’s long-running and well-travelled Family Channel hits. “The closure of WildBrain’s channels is certainly the end of an era, and it will undoubtedly limit the homes for Canadian stories, especially in the kids & family space.”

For Vérité Films’ Virginia Thompson, who partnered with WildBrain on the Ireland-Belgium-Canada treaty co-production Louise Lives Large, the channel closures are the “canaries in the coal mine” that should be raising red flags about issues within the Canadian content system.

“The funding mechanisms Canada has for content creation still rely to a large degree on a robust Canadian private broadcasting system paying into it. And that’s dead. The canary’s dead!” she says. “That’s what this situation with Family Channel illustrates.”

Many in the sector are regarding the channel closures as indicative of an economic and regulatory environment that has allowed the creation of original children’s programming to fall by the wayside, as the larger tectonic shift from broadcast to digital continues. 

“There was a perfect storm. Genre protection went away, streaming and digital picked up, and group-based licensing was put in place, so there was no real incentive for group broadcasters to focus on the kids business,” says Trent Locke, COO and EVP of finance, strategy and analytics at the Canada Media Fund (CMF). “The kids channels went away, and the audience went away at the same time.”

Finding a home for kids content
In the fallout from the WildBrain channel closures, producers are now looking to find new homes for the projects that were hosted by those channels. WildBrain itself is seeking a new Canadian broadcast or platform partner for its self-produced Family Channel original series Finding Her Edge, though it confirms that Netflix remains the series’ international home.  

Smaller producers that lack that kind of international reach are feeling the pressure the most keenly. 

Toronto’s Lopii Productions, founded by twin sisters Georgina and Rennata López, had partnered with Family Jr. and Family Channel on The Fabulous Show with Fay and Fluffy, a live-action preschool series fronted by children’s entertainers and drag performers Fay Slift (a.k.a. Jean Paul Kane, pictured top, right) and Fluffy Soufflé (Kaleb Robertson, pictured top, left). The second season of this award-winning series was released globally on WildBrain’s YouTube network in early summer, amid WildBrain’s unsuccessful complaints to the CRTC.

“We were honestly stunned,” says Rennata of the CRTC rulings and the subsequent collapse of the carriage agreements. “It seemed kind of like giving up on Canadian children, like, ‘Oh, they have YouTube.’ But they deserve high-quality original Canadian content, and [Family Channel] was one of the few homes for [that].”

The sisters say the fate of Fay and Fluffy is currently “up in the air,” though they have been having conversations with WildBrain about ways to keep the show going.  

“For smaller production companies like us, this move really affects us, because we don’t have a lot of other global partners for this show. [WildBrain was] our main broadcaster in Canada, and globally on their YouTube platform,” says Georgina. “So we’re hoping that other Canadian [private] broadcasters will step up to fill that void. It shouldn’t all be on [pubcasters like] TVO or CBC.”

Echoing the Lopii founders’ sentiments, Vérité’s Thompson says that while public broadcasters like CBC, TVO, TFO and Knowledge Network continue to do “wonderful work” in their children’s and family commissioning, their cross-genre programming commitments mean that they cannot give kids content the undivided attention that commercial specialty channels could provide. 

“It seems like the public broadcasters are the ones that are still standing [in the kids space], but we need to have a [viable] private and public broadcasting space, because that mix is what makes any system in Canada competitive,” she says.

Check back tomorrow for Part Two, which looks at how funding bodies and producers are trying to find ways for Canadian children’s content to survive.

With reporting from Jamie Casemore and Kelly Townsend.

Image courtesy of Lopii Productions