Netflix and Amazon seek to hook viewers early with high-quality content for kids
Greg Nichols / The California Sunday Magazine : Tweets: @chasnote and @lisard Tweets: Chas Edwards / @chasnote : Children 9 and younger watch 35 hrs of TV each week. No wonder Amazon and Netflix want your kids, https://stories.californiasunday.com/ ... @CalSunday Elisabeth Sylvan / @lisard : Why @Netflix & @Amazon want your kids. “The way kids watch"will “be grounded in how they used to watch on Netflix.” http://ow.ly/2btQjW
Context & Ripple Effects
In 2015 Netflix and Amazon spotted the same asset: children who watch roughly 35 hours of television a week and tend to ground their long-run viewing habits in whatever service they grew up with. That bet aged into explicit strategy — when Disney's library began slipping away, Netflix answered by hiring its own family-friendly creators instead of renting childhood franchises.
The surrounding coverage shows both halves of the play maturing since: parent-facing products like the Kids Top 10 row and recap email concede that parents, not kids, control the billing account, while advertisers have been pursuing children directly through YouTube influencers and apps — a parallel track that drew scrutiny of undue influence.
First-order effects
- For Netflix and Amazon, the kids profile becomes the highest-stakes real estate in the app: whoever owns a young child's default autoplay effectively decides which service the household keeps paying for.
- Parents gain leverage inside these products immediately — they choose what the child sees and, per the reporting, increasingly expect visibility into it.
Second-order effects
- Rivals without owned kids catalogs face a squeeze: as licensing becomes unreliable, Netflix's move to develop original family programming forces every competitor to either fund equivalent studios or cede the household default.
- Marketers chasing the same attention through adjacent channels like YouTube deepen the competition for children's screen time, pressuring Netflix and Amazon to defend engagement inside their own walls.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, childhood becomes a formal customer-acquisition channel for streaming — with platform investment shifting from licensed characters toward owned IP whose fandom persists into adulthood.
- That trajectory collides with regulation: the same concerns raised about marketers reaching six-year-olds on social apps extend naturally to streaming, especially once advertising enters kids' viewing environments — an area where Netflix's growing ad business and its parent-oversight tooling will eventually have to be reconciled, under rules not yet written.
The trend: Streaming platforms are converting childhood viewing habits into durable subscriber relationships, making kids' programming a strategic moat rather than filler catalog.