By Greg Nichols
Photographs by Spencer Lowell
The Californian Sunday Magazine

Capture d'écran Photographs by Spencer Lowell
Capture d’écran
Photographs by Spencer Lowell

Kids watch a lot of TV, which increasingly means watching a smartphone or tablet — in 2013, according to Common Sense Media, 75 percent of U.S. children aged 8 and younger had access to a smart mobile device in their homes. This, combined with young kids’ habit of playing favorite episodes again and again, gives video-on-demand networks such as Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, and Hulu Plus a big advantage over traditional broadcast and cable networks. Executives see an opportunity to shape a new generation’s viewing habits, as well as to turn parents, eager to entertain their kids with nonjunk, into subscribers.

For kids’ content, it’s using its massive programming budget — $3.2 billion in 2014 — to license existing movies and TV series from Disney and other companies and to create original content.