Toons.TV

» see toons.tv as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Angry Birds reached Turkey the way it reached everywhere, by being on the phone of everyone who had a phone. What sat behind the extra button on the home screen was a children's cartoon channel, and in 2013 I was twenty nine with no reason on earth to press it. This one is written from outside the target audience, which is the honest place to write it from.

Toons.TV launched on 17 February 2013. The Angry Birds Toons series started going out on the weekend of 16 March, a fifty two episode run with new episodes weekly. The way you got to it was by updating whichever Angry Birds game you already had installed, which added a channel button next to the level select.

Mikael Hed said the quiet part on the record at launch. With over 1.7 billion downloads, Rovio could reach a wider and more engaged audience than traditional distribution would allow. That is a games company announcing it does not need a broadcaster, and in 2013 it was close enough to true that television networks took meetings about it.

It was never only a phone thing either. The channel went out on Comcast's Xfinity platforms and on Samsung Smart TVs, with Roku following. Angry Birds Toons also aired on real television in a long list of countries, FOX8 in Australia and Cartoon Network in India among them. Rovio was running a distribution business and a studio at the same time.

~ the dossier ~

~ the numbers ~

The first run of Angry Birds Toons cleared a billion views, which was enough for the trade press to treat Rovio as a media company rather than as a developer with a lucky franchise. By December 2014 the service as a whole was above four billion views.

Rovio then did what a network does and started buying outside shows, bringing in third party content from Hasbro and from Stan Lee's studio to sit alongside its own. Piggy Tales and Angry Birds Stella filled out the schedule from the house side. For about two years Toons.TV genuinely looked like a channel.

~ how it actually ended ~

The install base was real and the views were real, and neither of those was the same thing as an audience that had chosen to be there. People pressed the button because it was in a game they had opened for another reason. Meanwhile every child with a tablet was already on YouTube, and YouTube Kids arrived in 2015 with a purpose built interface and an infinite catalog.

On 1 August 2017 Rovio retired the brand. The site and the app went off and the links were pointed at the official Angry Birds channel on YouTube. There was no sale and no press cycle worth the name. The company just stopped pretending it owned the pipe and moved its shows to where the viewing had been happening anyway.

~ what came after ~

The idea did not die with the brand. Every publisher that has since tried to put a video feed, a store or a news channel inside its own app is making the Toons.TV argument again: we already have the install, so we already have the distribution. Sometimes it holds. It holds a lot less often than the install number suggests it should.

~ the footnote ~

Rovio was bought by Sega in 2023 for around 706 million euros. The Angry Birds cartoons still exist and still get watched, on a channel owned by Google. The four year experiment in owning the whole chain from game to screen ended with the studio surviving and the network being the part thrown away.

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