If you’re hoping to tempt parents and children away from apps like Netflix, YouTube and the BBC’s iPlayer, a few terrible tusks, terrible claws and terrible teeth in terrible jaws can’t hurt.
UK-based app Hopster TV has bagged an exclusive deal to stream The Gruffalo and The Gruffalo’s Child, the two films based on Julia Donaldson’s perennially-popular children’s books.
Hopster, which charges parents a £3.99 monthly subscription to access TV shows and educational games through its iPhone and iPad app, is the first paid streaming service to secure a deal to offer the two films.
It’s a coup for the app, which launched in late 2013, and has been downloaded more than 100,000 times in the UK. Hopster has also just struck a deal with Hit Entertainment to bring shows like Thomas & Friends, Bob the Builder and Pingu to its app later this year.
“We’re really stoked: 100,000 downloads for an app that’s really tightly targeted at pre-schoolers, in a single country. There’s only a certain number of families with kids of the right age,” Hopster’s chief executive Nick Walters told The Guardian.
“We’re thrilled to have clocked up that many downloads in seven months just in the UK. And now to have the two Gruffalo films, which have never been on Netflix or Amazon. We’ll be the only place to get them over the summer.”
Walters said that The Gruffalo is a good match for Hopster TV, and not just because the app is aimed at the 2-6 year-olds who love the films, books and related Gruffalobilia. From launch, Hopster has pitched its app’s ability to encourage children in their early reading through play.
The app has shows including Paddington Bear, Ben & Holly’s Little Kingdom and 64 Zoo Lane through existing licensing deals, but complements them with its own learning games, created around the UK’s early years foundation stages curriculum.
The idea: children watch a show, then play a game geared towards early reading and writing, featuring that show’s characters and themes.
“We don’t just dump games in there: they really fit back to the TV show that you’ve just been watching,” said Walters. “There’s quite a lot going on under the surface: we’ve been out and developed a whole curriculum based on those early-years standards, working with experts.”
The company hopes this makes Hopster TV appealing to parents as an alternative to purely-passive TV viewing (not to mention non-educational game-playing) by their children. It sets the company apart from Netflix and Amazon, which are both doing more around children’s TV, but not yet adding interactive learning around that.
If anything, Hopster’s most direct competitor in the UK is the BBC’s CBeebies channel, which complements its shows with learning games on its website and in its Playtime app – although the latter does not also enable people to stream the shows.
“What’s so interesting about tablets and touchscreens is that kids encounter this world completely differently from adults,” said Walters.
“As a grown-up, you come at something like this going ‘is this a channel or a gaming service or a video-on-demand platform? But kids encounter it fresh: that move from watching a video to playing a game and back is so natural for them, and so encouraged by touchscreens.”
While Hopster has a seven-day trial for parents downloading its app, the company is otherwise entirely funded by their subscriptions: there is no free, ad-supported option. Walters declined to say how many of those first 100,000 downloaders have become subscribers, but said he’s seeing “exciting increases” on this front.
“The beauty of subscription is that we have no incentive other than to create something that parents absolutely love. We’re not trying to flog ads to them, or getting them to buy £69.99 of dodgy virtual goods,” he said.
“If we create something people really like, they can subscribe to it once then keep on paying, while also cancelling without penalty if they decide they don’t want it any more. We don’t want to just be a nice video player for kids: it’s an incentive for us to really invest in the curriculum in the games, and new features like offline viewing, which we added earlier this year.”
Hopster is part of a flurry of British startups exploring digital entertainment for children: there is also digital books store Me Books; the creativity-focused Night Zookeeper; and apps and books publisher Nosy Crow to name just three.
That’s alongside the efforts of a number of small but inventive children’s apps developers; larger companies like Mind Candy; and established media companies from the BBC to book publishers like Penguin.
“There’s a new wave of kids’ media that’s more personalised and which fuses elements of learning and education with more conventional media, and which in some cases is disrupting established business models” said Walters. “There’s a really interesting wave of startups coming out of the UK.”
He hopes Hopster’s Gruffalo deal will help more parents discover its app, with TV star Davina McCall enlisted to provide voice narration for an “in-app takeover” this week to help them find their way around the app.
For now, Hopster TV will remain iPhone and iPad only, although Walters said that “once we have the experience right” the company will look to other devices, including Android. Hopster is also thinking hard about when and how to expand beyond the UK in the future.
At a time when Netflix and Amazon are commissioning entirely new children’s TV shows, Hopster is also mulling its options for original content, or at least licensing videos from outside the traditional TV world.
It has already picked up Caspar Babypants, a series of music videos for children by Chris Ballew – from the band Presidents of the United States of America – which were originally launched online.
“We found it on YouTube, and it’s brilliant: outrageously catchy songs and really nicely animated. We picked that up, and it’s going gangbusters for us on the app. And as a digital platform, we can do that: look at shorter content, things that have their roots on YouTube,” said Walters.
He added that the Gruffalo deal shows Hopster’s commitment to companies in the traditional children’s entertainment world too, though.
“It’s exciting and humbling to work with someone like Magic Light, which created the Gruffalo films. They take this really seriously, and think really hard about who they want their partners to be,” said Walters.
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