Kindernet

» see kindernet.nl as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Kindernet was a Dutch children's channel that existed because of a legal workaround. Dutch law did not allow commercial television in 1988, so the channel put its office in Luxembourg, ran its signal through Luxembourg and England, and pointed it back at the Netherlands. That makes it the first commercial television network the country had, assembled out of a loophole and an Intelsat transponder.

Turkey did the same trick two years later. Star 1 went on the air in 1990 out of Germany, broadcasting back into a country where the law still gave TRT the monopoly at home, which is how private television actually arrived in Turkish living rooms. I was six. So the shape of Kindernet is familiar to me even though the channel itself is not: a kids' channel on the Dutch morning cable, in a language I do not speak, timesharing its hours with the Flemish BRT.

The idea came from Dennis Livson, a Finnish producer and distributor of animated programs who had concluded in the 1970s that children's television had become too violent for the audience it was aimed at. Kindernet was his answer, built on cartoons he considered violence-free. It launched on 1 March 1988, owned by his production company Telecable Benelux and financed by the British retailer WHSmith together with Fuji Eight, a Japanese company then in the Fuji Television group. The first slogan was "Kindernet, voor net uit bed", roughly Kindernet, for just out of bed. After some criticism they replaced it with a longer one promising parents a channel they could leave their children alone with.

~ the case file ~

~ three hours a morning ~

The schedule was strict and short. Broadcasts started at seven with an hour of half-hour shows, then a preschool block carrying the BRT series Tik Tak along with songs and magic tricks. From nine it turned educational, built around the Procidis Once Upon a Time series with a documentary behind it at half past. Weekends swapped that last hour for live action, since nobody had school. On satellite the channel shared its capacity with WHSmith's other services, taking the morning while Lifestyle had the day and Screensport had the night.

Money came from the cable companies, who paid a forty-cent levy per subscriber and passed it on. That covered about seventy percent of the Netherlands at its widest. By the early nineties the levy was not enough, and Kindernet started selling advertising for the first time.

~ the first ending ~

Through the late nineties the channel became a scheduling tenant. It timeshared with VTV from 1995 and later with Discovery. Net5 took the other half of the channel between 2000 and 2002, which is where the name Kindernet 5 came from. MTV Networks Europe bought it at the end of 2001 and moved it onto Veronica in September 2002, giving it a logo that looked a great deal like Nickelodeon's. The last new show to arrive before the rebrand was Mumble Bumble. A year after that the brand was folded into Nickelodeon and the original Kindernet stopped broadcasting, in December 2003.

~ the second kindernet ~

It came back on 4 April 2011, this time as a Nickelodeon-family channel taking over the slot TMF had held since 1995, with a programming deal that brought in the Studio 100 catalog of classics. It ran from six in the morning until three in the afternoon, sharing the channel with Comedy Central. On 1 October 2012 that nine-hour window was cut to three, six until nine.

Kindernet shut down on 1 November 2013 so Comedy Central could run around the clock, with Nick Jr. taking the children's audience. Two Kindernets, both of them killed by whoever else wanted the hours.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »