KidsClick

» see kidsclick.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the last words ~

Saturday morning cartoons on a broadcast signal is an American institution I know as a reference in other people's writing, never as a morning. In 2017 Sinclair Broadcast Group decided to rebuild one on free-to-air television, years after everyone else had walked away from the idea.

Sinclair announced it on 2 May 2017 and had it on the air by 1 July. KidsClick was a joint venture with Toon Goggles, with MGM handling distribution. It ran daily on This TV and on a list of Sinclair stations that between them covered 75 million households. It was also a website and an app, which was the part the press release kept emphasizing. The block was the first children's lineup on American over-the-air television since Vortexx closed in September 2014 that was not built to satisfy educational programming rules, which meant it could just show cartoons.

On 1 July 2018 This TV dropped it and the block moved to Sinclair's own TBD channel, where it had been running in parallel since May. Nine months after that it was gone.

~ the record ~

~ how it landed ~

The programming was a mix of licensed long-form animation and short filler, including European and Japanese series that American broadcast had no other route for. Sinclair ran the whole thing out of a cloud playout system instead of a traditional master control, which was the real experiment: a national children's block assembled and distributed as software.

That experiment worked. Sinclair said afterward that the cloud technology had been a successful testing ground and went on to use it for its digital broadcast networks. The company kept the playout system and dropped the cartoons.

~ the last saturday ~

On 29 March 2019 the KidsClick Facebook page posted that the block would close on the 31st. That was two days after Nieman Lab reported Sinclair was shutting Circa, its news site, in the same round of cuts. The company had just failed to buy Tribune Media in a 3.9 billion dollar deal that collapsed the previous August, and the mood had changed.

The last broadcast went out on Sunday 31 March with an episode of Oggy and the Cockroaches. None of the advertising mentioned that anything was ending, and the promotional spot at the end of the show told viewers the block would return the next Saturday morning. Whoever cut that promo had not been told either.

~ what got buried with it ~

kidsclick.com now answers with a redirect to sbgi.net, the Sinclair corporate site, so the brand's last act is to forward children to an investor relations page. Toon Goggles, the smaller partner, is still trading at its own domain with its own catalog.

What actually died here is narrower than cartoons. KidsClick was a bet that a broadcast signal could still assemble a children's audience at a fixed hour, in a year when the children in question were already choosing their own next video. Twenty-one months was how long that bet lasted.

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