28 July 2015: DreamWorks Animation debuts its first dedicated linear channel in the world on Saturday, 1 August, in an exclusive carriage deal with Thai pay-TV platform CTH.

The mass-market DreamWorks kids and family channel goes up in English, with a fully dubbed Thai schedule up and running by 1 September.

The HD channel will be distributed across the region by HBO Asia (ContentAsia, 10 December 2014), which will also handle marketing and technical services out of Singapore.

The carriage deal indicates something of a return to grace of CTH, which is said to have lagged on payments to channel programmes in the recent past.

DreamWorks’ signature originals, such as All Hail King Julien and The Adventures of Puss in Boots, have been included in the launch grid, along with adventure series Casper’s Scare School, and new original action series Dinotrux.

The channel will also present a daily morning pre-school block, DreamWorks Junior, featuring new productions such as Raa Raa The Noisy Lion and Guess with Jess. Dragons: Race to the Edge, inspired by the How to Train Your Dragon theatrical franchise, build out the schedule in the fourth quarter of this year.

CTH subscribers can access the DreamWorks channel anywhere from THB99/US$284 to THB499/US$14 depending on their subscription packages.

In the original announcement last year, DreamWorks Animation promised “more original content than any other kids channel in the region”.

The company also said the channel would tap more than 2,000 hours of existing DreamWorks TV content in addition to more than 1,000 half-hours of original animation the company currently has in production.

Eric Ellenbogen, co-head, international TV and DreamWorks Classics, says the service has been designed for a multi-screen universe, with all rights across all platforms available to partners in Asia. “It’s not only TV,” he stresses.

A full suite of online, on-demand, apps and games as well as options such as ‘download to go’ run alongside the linear offering. Consumer access points include free online/mobile video shorts, games and some content and range up to full content-rich apps authenticated with subscription partners.

“We aim to make our content very easily accessible,” he says, adding that “making content ubiquitous, available everywhere, is the best defense against piracy”.

Speaking in Bangkok just ahead of the announcement on Tuesday (28 July), Ellenbogen said the benefit of being “late” into the market is that “we arrive without legacy issues... we have a complete set of rights available for all markets”.

The decision to launch a linear channel as part of a multi-platform, multi-media offering rather than push programme licensing/sales was made because of the amount of TV content DreamWorks has available. “The [licensing/syndication] market can’t absorb all we have,” he says.

Pro-social advertising options are being explored for about five minutes an hour.

DreamWorks Animation is already producing television content in Asia, including two series in Korea and George of the Jungle, a co-production with Singapore-based production house August Media.

Ellenbogen is after “every form of distribution in Asia”, with a preference for exclusive carriage agreements. The approach, he says, is to “put all our eggs into one basket and watch the basket carefully”.