Children’s TV channel CITV – beloved for youths’ classics together with Danger Mouse and Rainbow – will shut subsequent month.
It is making approach for ITVX Kids, the kids’s service on ITV‘s new streaming service ITVX, which launched earlier this summer season.
ITV advised Sky News: “As a consequence of this new streaming approach and responding to the changing ways children and their parents are increasingly accessing content, the CITV broadcast channel will close after the summer holidays on 1st September.”
ITVX changed ITV Hub in December 2022, with the general public service broadcaster making strikes to compete with streaming giants together with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.
Children’s ITV launched in 1983, sitting throughout weekday late afternoons, with the digital CITV channel following in 2006.
Aimed at youngsters aged 5 to 12, a few of its best-loved reveals embrace My Parents Are Aliens, Fraggle Rock, The Worst Witch, Children’s Ward, Raggy Dolls, Woof, Art Attack and Horrid Henry.
Classics which have earned cult standing over time embrace Ghost Train, Fun House, Knightmare, Press Gang, Danger Mouse, Trap Door and Count Duckula.
Pre-school hits included Rainbow, Rosie And Jim and Button Moon.
Actor Matthew Kelly was the primary presenter on the channel in 1983, showing within the hyperlinks between the reveals, whereas a lot later in 1993, Stephen Mulhern and Danielle Nicholls grew to become the hosts of the channel.
CITV celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in January, with an “Old Skool” schedule of programmes all through the weekend.
ITV says ITVX Kids will “supercharge” its presence in streaming, doubling its present youngsters’ content material providing with greater than 100 reveals and over 1,000 hours of programming – together with comedy, gameshows, stay motion, animation and sport.
It can be geared toward each school-age and pre-school age kids, the broadcaster mentioned.
Existing favourites, together with Lloyd of the Flies, Lily’s Driftwood Bay, Claude, Mumfie, Mystery Lane and The Rubbish World of Dave Spud, will all be out there on ITVX Kids.
The animated collection of Mr Bean, Teletubbies Let’s Go, Sooty and Bob The Builder will even be there.
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ITVX has additionally mentioned the service’s ambition is to have all of its kids’s content material subtitled, and round 20% of it audio described.
ITV will keep its LittleBe pre-school phase on ITVBe and also will supply some kids’s content material within the early mornings on ITV2 from September.
Recent BARB viewing information has proven that whereas the common quantity of broadcast TV minutes of youngsters’s TV channels watched by 4-year-olds per week has declined by 62% since 2019, viewing has risen by 30% in the identical interval, demonstrating the “streaming first” pattern in viewing habits for younger individuals.
The BBC has additionally introduced plans to cease broadcasting its kids’s CBBC channel – dwelling to reveals together with Blue Peter and Newsround – on TV sooner or later.
Despite the rise in on-line viewing, some have argued that not all kids have entry to the web.
Spending on unique child’s content material within the UK has been slashed following the 2006 ban on promoting junk meals to kids.
The Young Audiences Content Fund – a £44m fund designed to assist assist kids’s programming on channels together with ITV and Channel 5 – was scrapped by the federal government final yr.
Source: information.sky.com”