Kids Media Club Podcast

Three guests on one episode — Oliver and Alvaro, co-founders of Telos Media and the team behind Solar Balls (half a billion views on the English channel alone, 2 billion across all languages), and Mary James, the Hollywood-experienced executive producer who bridges their digital-first world and the mainstream. Together they've just launched Run Monster Run, a new animated IP that hit 20 million vi...

Caspar Nadaud, founder of theatrical distribution company Piece of Magic Entertainment, joins Andy, Emily, and Jo to unpack exactly how The Amazing Digital Circus went from a YouTube finale to a global cinema event — and what it reveals about the new relationship between creators, fandoms, and the big screen. Piece of Magic handled European distribution and helped take the Glitch-produced finale t...

A crossover episode with Eric Calderon of Surviving Animation, recorded with Andy and Eric fresh off the ground in Annecy while Jo and Emily nurse their FOMO from home. It's the second collaboration between the two podcasts, and the energy carries that — equal parts industry analysis and genuine enthusiasm for the world's oldest animation festival, which Eric was attending for the first time in 14...

Andy is calling in from Annecy — sunglasses on, rosé imminent, 45 minutes from his accommodation in 38-degree heat — while Jo and Emily hold the fort from home. It's a short, lively check-in from the world's oldest animation festival, and the main topic writing itself on every wall in town is AI. Andy reports that the conversation around AI at Annecy has meaningfully shifted from previous years. T...

It's been a year since K-Pop Demon Hunters dropped on Netflix — quietly, in June 2025, without much fanfare, to a modest first week. The trio mark the anniversary with a look back at how the phenomenon actually unfolded, and a frank assessment of where the franchise goes from here. Emily, Andy, and Jo piece together the real story of the IP's growth: the music videos Netflix pushed to YouTube that...

The band is back together — and Jo has news. She's joined Coolabi as SVP of Digital, with a brief that includes Warrior Cats: a book IP 74 volumes deep, a Roblox game at 730 million visits, a Tencent animation in production, and one of the most voracious fandoms in kids media. It's a good segue into the episode's main subject. Amazing Digital Circus was supposed to have a four-day cinema run. It's...

A hosts' hangout with Andy and Jo, prompted by a conversation that has been running hot across LinkedIn all week: creator-made films are pulling audiences into cinemas in a way that Hollywood studios haven't managed for years. Backrooms — made by 20-year-old Kane Parsons who taught himself Blender during Covid — and Obsession, made by Cory Barker for under a million dollars, are both seeing succes...

A hosts' deep dive with Andy and Jo, recorded in the middle of a British heatwave with Emily absent. Jo has spent the last six months tracking the top 50 sports games on Roblox daily, and this episode is her five-takeaway breakdown of what that data reveals about how teenage sports fandom actually works — and how far behind most sports organisations are in understanding it. The headline finding is...

Halle Stanford has spent almost 30 years at the Jim Henson Company — executive producing Fraggle Rock, creating Sid the Science Kid — and has just launched Wowsabout, a new puppet preschool special on PBS Kids about a guitar-playing hedgehog and a tree-loving pig out to see the wows of the world. It's the first preschool show built around the emotion of awe, and it's already outperforming existing...

Emily cornered Sydney Bright at Kids Screen after she got mobbed following her panel — dropped a card in the middle of the crowd, said "come on the podcast," and here we are. Sydney is Head of Global Animation at WEBTOON, the world's leading digital comics platform with 145 million monthly active users, and her job is to identify titles from the platform ripe for adaptation and take them through t...

A viral YouTube video calling Bluey's deal with the ABC "the shittest deal ever" has set Australian media alight — and sent Andy, Emily, and Jo straight to the recording button. The claim: zero dollars from Bluey's global success ever made it back to Australia. The reality, as the trio unpick it, is considerably more complicated. This is a bonus episode that uses the viral moment as a jumping-off...

The second episode in the Kids Media Club's sponsored series with WildBrain Media Solutions brings in Emma Witkowski, WildBrain's VP of Media Solutions. The topic is one the podcast has been circling for a while: kids and family audiences have migrated to YouTube and FAST, but the advertising money largely hasn't followed — and the reasons are more structural than most people in the industry reali...

Episode Title: This is a special compilation episode revisiting two of the Kids Media Club's most popular conversations on kids online safety — with Ashley Mady from Zigazoo and Chris Heatherly, former General Manager of Club Penguin at Disney. With regulation around kids social media still very much in flux, it felt like the right moment to bring these two perspectives together. Ashley walks thro...

A bonus episode with Andy and Jo, fresh off the plane from Content Europe in Lisbon, where both were on panels and Jo was moderating. Emily is absent this week, so the two debrief on the themes that dominated the conference. The defining question that ran through almost every session was deceptively simple: what even is a hit anymore? A show can hit 200 million YouTube views and still not be finan...

This episode of the Kids Media Club Podcast is part of a sponsored series produced in partnership with WildBrain Media Solutions. We get together with Kate Smith, EVP of Audience Engagement at WildBrain to talk about what constitutes a TV Network in 2026. Within the industry the term "distribution" has evolved. Kate opens by sharing how WildBrain has pioneered its own Network, driven by TV viewing...

Episode Title: Netflix Playground: Is Netflix Building the Answer to YouTube Kids? — A Kids Media Club Bonus Episode Episode Summary: A short bonus episode with Andy and Emily Horgan, recorded to react to a significant announcement from Netflix that landed while Emily was on holiday — which she notes felt like being deliberately trolled. Netflix has launched the Netflix Playground app, a dedicated...

Episode Summary: Jo is away in Lisbon for this episode, leaving Andy and Emily Horgan to kick things off with a discussion about a timely YouTube Culture and Trends report — Animation's New Wave: How Independent Online Animators Are Reshaping the Entertainment Industry — before bringing in a guest who feels almost like the report's cover star: indie animator and creator Emily Brundige of Strawberr...

This episode, sponsored by Innov8 Creative Academy and Deddy Bears, sees Andy and Emily joined by two guests who met through a thoroughly Irish chain of mutual acquaintances and ended up building something genuinely unusual together. Gavin Lawler is the founder of Innov8 Creative Academy — a toy inventor and entrepreneur with over 250 IPs in his portfolio and a background that includes the Irish F...

With Emily otherwise occupied, this episode is a hosts' hangout — just Andy and Jo, with a car pickup deadline providing a natural time limit. The conversation covers three topics: the appointment of the BBC's new Director General, the news that YouTube kids show Danny Go has been picked up by Netflix, and some cautious optimism about original IP at the box office. The BBC discussion centres on wh...

This is a short, unplanned emergency episode — Andy, Jo, and Emily jumping on a three-way call in real time to react to a double dose of seismic industry news landing in the same day. First came the announcement that World Screen (and its TV Kids publication) would be ceasing to publish. Then, as the episode was being recorded, the news dropped that the Kids Screen Summit would not be returning in...

This bonus episode takes a different format, with Emily reporting live from the Animation Dingle Festival in County Kerry, Ireland. Rather than a single guest, the episode brings together three separate conversations captured across the festival weekend: an interview with co-founder and festival director Maurice Galway, a chat with veteran screenwriter and director Karey Kirkpatrick, and a convers...

In this episode, Andy, Jo, and Emily are joined by Ashley Mady, President of Zigazoo — a social media platform built specifically for kids that has been quietly growing its user base to over 10 million while the wider debate around children and social media has grown louder and louder. The timing feels right: with social media bans for under-16s being debated in legislatures around the world, Ziga...

This bonus episode of the Kids Media Club sees Andy and Jo joined by Emily, who has just published her latest Netflix Kids Content Performance Report — a deep dive into Netflix's engagement data covering the second half of 2025. It's a data-rich conversation that covers which shows are winning, which are declining, and what it all means for the wider kids content landscape. The headline finding is...

This is the second half of the Kids Media Club's conversation with Chris Heatherly, the former Disney executive who oversaw Club Penguin at its peak. The discussion picks up where part one left off, diving deep into online safety, the realities of moderating kids' platforms at scale, and where kids gaming is headed next. Chris pulls no punches on the subject of child safety online. He walks throug...

In this episode, Andy, Jo and Emily sit down with Chris Heatherly — former Disney executive, Club Penguin General Manager, and the man who ran the world's biggest kids' playground for nearly a decade. What follows is a candid, fascinating look at one of kids media's great "what ifs." Chris traces his journey from overseeing Disney's toy business to becoming the custodian of Club Penguin, the safe,...