British children’s TV startup Hopster is expanding globally, launching its video-on-demand app in more than 100 countries at the end of April.
The app, which has been installed more than 265,000 times since its launch in the UK in late 2013, is a Netflix-style subscription service, with parents paying £3.99 a month for its catalogue of shows and learning games.
The expansion will initially involve Hopster’s iOS app and a catalogue of more than 600 episodes through global deals with producers including Nelvana, Millimages, Cake and Earthtree Media for shows including Max & Ruby, Louie and Babar.
“We raised some financing at the back of last year, and it was clear that one of the things it was going to make sense to do was to be in more places. One of the really cool things about a digital platform is it’s so much easier to be effectively global,” Hopster’s chief executive Nick Walters told the Guardian.
“In the pay-TV world, if you want to launch in a new territory, you’re staring down the barrels of $700k in costs before you even launch. For us, at the end of the month we’re going to go into the App Store, flick a switch and it’ll be there.”
For now, Hopster’s app will remain English-language, with the company hoping parents in other countries will see it as an opportunity for their children to learn English. Walters has high hopes for the app in countries like India in particular.
“If you look at the size of the iOS App Store market globally, and you look at some of the third-party data sources, the education App Store category in India is one of the top three in the world,” he said.
“The other interesting thing about India is that there are more smartphones than there are digital TV households. I think it’s got real potential for literally tens of millions of people in India’s first experience of rich, multi-channel media services to not be through TV, but through things they get on their phones and tablets.”
One country that’s not part of this wave of expansion is the US, with Hopster biding its time before trying to crack the world’s most lucrative pay-TV market.
“There’s a long and inglorious history of UK media companies charging into the US and then not getting it right. If we do it, we want to make sure it’s really right,” said Walters.
Hopster’s most direct competitor is Latin American service PlayKids, which has also expanded globally. However, there are some even bigger companies in this space too, with Netflix and Amazon both increasing their catalogues of children’s shows, while YouTube has its YouTube Kids app, albeit only in the US for now.
Walters said that Hopster is happy to go up against Netflix and Amazon. “Does anyone, as a parent or as a content owner, want to be in a place where you only have one or two massive content warehouses doing all your video on demand?” he said. “Or do you think there is room for people who offer something a bit different?”
What about YouTube? Google’s video service is facing an investigation by the US Federal Trade Commission over the advertising in its YouTube Kids app, but it remains a massive player in the global children’s entertainment market.
“I think YouTube Kids in some ways misses the point. What changed the industry was everything that YouTube had done for the previous three years. It was already a massive player in kids: there was loads of kids’ content there and kids spent loads of time watching it,” said Walters.
“What they did was announce a sensible set of parental controls and a slightly different UX [user experience] wrapper, and that made sense. But when you do a word cloud of how people describe Hopster, the key words are ‘easy’, ‘educational’ and ‘entertainment’. I don’t think YouTube Kids is terribly easy, and I don’t think it’s terribly educational.”
YouTube could be a rich source of content for Hopster as it strikes deals to add new shows to its app, however. One of its most popular strands already is Caspar Babypants, which started life as a children’s music channel on YouTube.
“You’ll see us in the next year or so do deals with people who aren’t conventional kids TV companies. They might be people creating content for YouTube, or people who started life as games companies or doing design,” said Walters.
He also stressed that Hopster is keen to pick up shows from independent TV producers who are struggling to get commissioned by the large children’s TV broadcasters.
“Commissioning is really quite broken: the whole model of commissioning and distribution doesn’t really work any more. There’s far too much great stuff looking to get out on channels which increasingly aren’t commissioning, or are focused on a very small number of sources,” said Walters.
“There’s definitely a great role or us in helping solve that problem by picking up shows and helping them find an audience. We’re curated and handpicked, and there’s a decent chance that a kid using Hopster will go into every channel at least once.”
Hopster is sticking to its monthly subscription model for its global rollout. Walters declined to say how many of the 265k installs in the UK have turned into paying subscribers, but said he’s encouraged by the growth so far.
“If you look at the App Store top grossing charts, we’re fairly consistently in the top 10 grossing apps for the entertainment category in the UK. That’s people paying. We’re growing subscribers overall certainly double-digits month-on-month, so I think we’re getting there,” he said.
“You do have to work to explain why people should pay, but Hopster gets used by our subscribers for about half an hour a day, every day. If you think about that relative to the couple of quid you might pay for a magazine that lasts you a train ride, it’s pretty good value.”
