KidsCo, open for business

Harvey Shore spoke with Paul Robinson, the London-based founder and managing director of global children’s’ pay-TV channel KidsCo, who is visiting Australia for the second time for the ASTRA Conference this week.

Last trip, in November 2009, he raised eyebrows by joining those who accused ABC-TV of bullying producers and competitive channels in its rush to lock up both free-TV and pay-TV rights to programs for its new children’s channel ABC3. Robinson said, “All they’re really doing is using public money to increase the price of acquired programming. It’s outrageous.”

This trip, he’s here to join a panel of powerbrokers at a breakout session during the annual ASTRA Conference. At least that’s the cover story. The hidden agenda (and it’s not that well hidden) is to do a little smooching with Kim Williams and his cronies at Foxtel (who added KidsCo to their line-up last November), and to keep faith with a promise he made on that earlier trip – to develop an Australian co-production within 12-18 months of KidsCo’s November launch.

Robinson (who has 30 years experience in the industry) readily admits he hasn’t yet seen the Australian co-prod he’s looking for, and says finding popular kids’ programs for a global market is a slow and risky business. “In any one year, we may look at 120 program proposals worldwide. We’ll fund perhaps 20 of those to pilot stage. Maybe four will get commissioned for an initial series. Only one or two will become hits and get re-signed.”