Kids platform, Hopster, is coming to Asia with an SVOD play deeply rooted in big-brand traditional video with a strong interactive angle. Founder/chief executive and former Viacom exec, Nick Walters, talks about keeping things safe, playing and learning, a new generation of content creators, and being a tech company first.

Much has been said – some of it useful – about children and their multi-device entertainment preferences. But here’s a universal truth few dispute: Kids who love Thomas the Tank Engine will love him anywhere. Same with Madeline, Angelina Ballerina, Paddington Bear, Max & Ruby, Babar, Pingu, Postman Pat, Fifi and the Flowertots...

Whatever its sparkly new tech-driven features, two-year-old kids service, Hopster, is deeply anchored in content that kids and parents have, for decades, tuned in to. With a layer that leads them into the digital promise.

It’s this mix that former Viacom exec and Hopster founder/chief executive, Nicholas Walters, is betting on. He launched the app-based platform because, he says, conventional media struggles to get it right.

“There are a couple of interesting things happening in the industry,” Walters told delegates at this year’s ContentAsia Summit in September. For one, the debate over the extent to which audiences are shifting from linear TV to on-demand is, for the kids segment at least, “kind of over... It might take five years, it might take 10 years, but I think we know kids vastly prefer watching on demand to watching on linear,” he says.

Children, he adds, “like being able to control the pace at which they watch, they like being able to go back to their favourite things, being able to repeat view. As a parent, you much prefer to be able to leave your child in a safe environment.” Nothing that kids channels and programmers haven’t been saying forever.

And then comes the digital kick. Given that “you know that kids are goingto end up preferring to be in an on-demand world”, the choices then become all about creating and shaping that world.

What kind of world might that be? Walters says the answer, for children at least, is not “content warehouses... big, 10,000 episodes of mixed kids and movies and other things”.

“It’s partly about safety, about wanting to know that you’re in an area where the only content that you are going to find is appropriate for a pre-schooler,” he says.

Specialisation is a hallmark of the on-demand world, where “you can do things that parents and families really care about. And an obvious part of that, for us, is saying, well why does an SVOD service just have to be about video? Why can’t it be about other things that kids love? And why can’t we use games and interactivity to make the experience more active and stimulating and better for kids? That led us down the path of building Hopster.”

At the same time, he acknowledges that linear channels remain relevant today.

“Linear is where the majority of kids TV viewing still happens. Do I think they’ll still be relevant in 10 years time? No, I don’t... I think that ship is sailing,” he says.

Walters started working on Hopster – an app for phones, tablets and/or connected TV sets – full time two or three years ago. “We’re 100% kids and 100% pre-school, that’s all we do, pre-school video and learning for connected devices,” he says.

He stresses that Hopster is not a classroom product. “We are a play and learning service... I wouldn’t recommend that you put Hopster in a classroom and give it to kids and say that’s the only way you learn. We are about taking the time that kids do spend watching TV and trying to make that time better. And when we do that it’s important that we are credible”.

That credibility is built on Hopster’s panel of educationalists, including two U.K. professors plus an educational research consultancy.

“They vet pretty much everything that we do,” Walters says, adding that the curriculum that sits beneath the platform means that every show, game, experience – “everything that a child can do on Hopster” – fits into a specific framework.

Hopster’s content is a mixed bag of kids genres. In the U.K., the service has licensed about 1,500 episodes, including high-profile award winners such as Thomas the Tank Engine, Ben and Holly’s Little Kingdom and Super Why!. Other shows, such as Swedish series Learn to Draw, are more explicitly educational.

Hopster has also started acquiring content from Asia, including Aesop’s Theatre and Wonderballs out of Korea. “We’ll keep adding content that we think is relevant,” Walters says.

The platform currently works with six kids distributors: DreamWorks, Hit Entertainment, DHX, Corus, eOne and Millimage. Content sustainability “is the same for Hopster as it is for anyone who works with licensed content: you have to be doing a good job with the content, you have to give it a good home, you need to be providing a nice environment around it, and you need to be paying people a fair amount,” Walters says.

And then there’s the world of non-traditional content creators. “In many countries, our top two or three ranking titles originated on YouTube. And that really shows the extent to which the right thing in the right context at the right time [works]... it doesn’t have to cost millions to make,” he adds.

Hopster creates all its own games and builds all the interactivity. “Increasingly what we’re doing with our interactivity is trying to break down the barrier between a video and a game. So you’re seeing our games making more use of animation. All that sort of stuff we do ourselves”.

The platform hasn’t made any of its own conventional video entertainment for the digital platform – for now. Walters says Hopster, like the rest of the content industry, will probably move in that direction, with a new (and different) generation of content creators.

“The ‘professional’ kids industry has been a little bit slow to embrace digital platforms as a place for original content; they’ve been very quick to re-license content to VOD platforms. It’s a new generation, or a different generation, of creators who’ve started creating for YouTube and digital platforms, but as we’re starting to see more and more good ideas coming through, yeah, I think we’ll do more of that,” Walters says.

The move into Asia this year is part of a 100-country expansion for Hopster, which launched in the U.K. at the end of 2013 and is now the top grossing iOS app for kids in the U.K. The iOS app launched globally in June. The Android and connected TV versions will follow, along with teams on the ground in various regions, including Asia.

Walters says Hopster’s challenges are the same those faced by everyone else in the online/on-the-go universe, including payment processes/billing/digital wallet integration and providing smooth streaming experiences one territory at a time. Although it’s generally becoming easier, “all of those are real issues, and we have to deal with them as much as anyone else,” he says, adding that the “arc of technology is long, but it bends towards universal connectivity”.

Hopster’s revenue model is pure subscription. An ad-free service is, he says, “an important part of what makes us different from a conventional kids TV channel”. In the U.K., Hopster costs a standard £3.99/US$6, which will for the moment be applied globally. That will change by the end of this year, Walters says. “We’ve just begun experimenting around that, so in a couple of markets we’ve now cut pricing quite sharply and we’re going to be looking at some different models,” he says.

The content strategy for the global roll out is “about going deep in each of those countries”, Walters says. This includes more interactivity associated with the TV shows.

One of the new tools encourages kids to be creative and create their own drawings and animation by pulling images from the TV show they’re watching and using those as a starting point for a creative journey. “So rather than just have a blank piece of paper, which kids often find quite intimidating, we say, ‘hey you just saw Thomas the Tank Engine, now you can draw your own tank engine’,” Walters says.

“You’re going to see us do more and more things where we integrate games into the TV experience, so there’s this kind of natural flow between a video and a game and back,” he adds.

Hopster licenses online content from creators rather than integrating the YouTube player into its own platform. “We don’t do that for two reasons. The first is that we don’t want YouTube to drop an ad in there without us knowing about it, and secondly we want to have content available for download as well, and we can’t do that from YouTube. So we always go back to the creator and re-license it,” he says.

The relationship with existing pay-TV operators and platforms is a work in progress. “Across the world, you’re seeing more and more pay-TV platforms starting to integrate OTT [into their offerings]... Kids have always obviously been a big part of the story for pay-TV operators, and I think as you start to see kids specialist OTT players like us rolling out, you’re going to see more and more opportunities for us to find interesting ways to work with pay-TV operators and telcos,” he adds.

Walters says market experience has showed that “it’s really tough to do this yourself as a content owner”. Few have tried to create their own thematic SVOD services for kids “and have discovered that it takes a lot more than just great content... If there ever was a question around whether the market needs specialist players like us to do these kind of things, I think there’s a general recognition now that we do, so that’s helpful.”

At heart, Walters says, Hopster is a technology company. “We’re a technology company that makes a great product, which houses great content. But fundamentally we’re a technology company”.

“A lot of content owners – and this applies to kids, but it applies to other places as well – think, ‘well, we have great shows, we can get an agency to build us an app and we can plug in a video player and hey presto we’ll have an SVOD service’. And it doesn’t really work. You might get a little bit of initial discovery, but unless you’re good at the data side, unless you’re good at the payment side, unless you’re good at the UI side, unless you’re really thinking deeply about how you get video and interactivity to work, unless you’re dealing with all the challenges that actually go into running an end-to-end technology stack, you’re not going to be very good at it. It takes money, and it takes investment, and it takes skills,” Walters says.

Hopster shares data with content providers monthly; “everything we have we share” in a way that is comprehensible, Walter says. He also talks about “deep dives” that offer more comprehensive analytics about the people who liked a show and what else they liked, about the average ages of users and where they come from, “and not just how many views they got last month... that’s a level of insight they don’t get from some other SVOD providers”.

Data informs Hopster’s new content selection as well as the gaming experience. “We’ve just licensed a whole bunch more music content, because we saw how strongly music was performing,” Walters says, describing review and adjustment as a “constant process”.

Walters says the easy-out subscription experience is a “market expectation” – a hygiene factor for on-demand platforms – by now. “If you make it really easy to unsubscribe, it builds confidence in people to come back and re-subscribe. Whereas, if you subscribe and it’s a nightmare to unsubscribe, you’re probably never going to come back and re-subscribe,” he says.

This easy-unsubscribe process can, he adds, work to a provider’s advantage. “We offer most of our content available for download. So we have loads of usage around holidays, because kids and families want to pack Hopster to take with them... Sometimes they unsubscribe when they get back from holiday, and that’s ok, because if they’ve had a really good experience, they’ll probably come back and re-subscribe at their next holiday. So I think if you do it well, it can actually play to your advantage”.

This article first appeared in ContentAsia Issue 4, 2015, published in September 2015