kividoo

» see kividoo.de as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obit ~

German children's television had a subscription service of its own for eight years, and unless you were raising a small child in Germany between 2015 and 2023 there was no reason on earth to have heard of it. I had not. kividoo turned up in a Wikidata query of dead services, spelled in lowercase, with a shutdown date and almost nothing written about it in English.

It launched on 28 April 2015 out of Cologne, owned outright by Super RTL Fernsehen GmbH & Co. KG. The library ran to roughly 3,500 episodes and films aimed at children, with audio plays added in July 2016. Titles came from DreamWorks Animation and Mattel among others, and some seasons landed on kividoo before they reached German television. Season six of King Julien premiered there.

The design decision worth remembering is that the interface changed shape depending on how old the child said they were. Preschoolers were shown pictures only. Text appeared for school-age users and not before. Parents could blacklist individual titles so they never rendered at all, and could set both how long the app was allowed to run and what hours of the day it worked.

In early 2023 a notice went up on the homepage giving 31 March as the last day. From 1 April 2023 kividoo.de has redirected to toggo.de, the older and plainer Super RTL web property that was there before kividoo and is still there now.

~ the rap sheet ~

~ what a broadcaster was afraid of ~

Super RTL had been the largest children's channel in Europe, a 50/50 joint venture between RTL Group and Disney set up in 1995. kividoo was the defensive move a broadcaster makes when it can see the audience leaving the schedule for on-demand. Build the on-demand yourself, charge for it monthly, keep the child inside your own brand.

The joint venture did not survive the decade either. Disney sold its half to RTL in March 2021, cleared by the German competition authority that June, and went off to put everything into Disney+. Super RTL's partner had become its competitor, which is roughly the story of every legacy kids' brand in that period.

~ the reprieve ~

kividoo was already on the chopping block three years before it died. In an April 2020 interview with DWDL, Super RTL's managing director Claude Schmit said closing the service had been under consideration for that year. It did not happen. The portal had been redesigned in May 2019 with new features and it kept running through the pandemic, when there was suddenly a very large captive audience of German children at home on weekdays.

~ the day it died ~

31 March 2023, announced on its own front page rather than in a press release, which is how most small services go. There was no trade coverage of the closure and no explanation offered. The next morning the domain pointed at toggo.de and eight years of a paid product became a redirect to a free one.

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