About KidZ (Israeli TV channel)

KidZ (Israeli TV channel)

KidZ was a Hebrew-language Israeli television channel for children and teenagers that broadcast from 1 January 2017 until 31 December 2020. It was produced by Slutzky Communications Channels, the production company of Haim Slutzky, and it was created as a direct replacement for the veteran Children's Channel on the yes satellite platform. During its four years on air the channel was carried by yes and by the HOT cable network, and it was also available to customers of the STINGTV and NEXT TV streaming services. Its schedule combined original Israeli studio programmes, youth dramas and comedies commissioned separately for each platform, and a large library of acquired animated and live-action series dubbed or presented for Israeli children. Although it existed for only four years, KidZ occupied a central place in Israeli children's television because of the circumstances of its birth: it emerged from one of the most bitter carriage disputes in the history of Israeli pay television, between yes and the RGE group, and its launch and closure bookended a period of rapid change in how Israeli children watched television.

Origins in the yes and RGE carriage dispute

For sixteen years, the Children's Channel, produced by Noga Communications, part of the RGE group, had been the flagship children's service of the yes satellite platform and a fixture of its basic package. In the second half of 2016, relations between yes and RGE broke down. The dispute was partly about money and partly about control: the two companies were simultaneously in conflict over the payment terms for RGE's Sport 5 channels, and the children's services became another front in the same commercial war. On 11 December 2016 the Children's Channel announced that its broadcasts on yes would end on 1 January 2017, and that a new children's channel, to be called yes KidZ, would be created in its place. The split did not end the conflict. The two companies filed mutual lawsuits, including a fight over the rights to the original children's productions that RGE had made for yes over the years. At the centre of that legal battle stood the popular youth series Oboy; at the end of December 2016, the Tel Aviv District Court issued an interim order requiring RGE to continue supplying episodes of the series to yes, so that yes could broadcast them on its channels and on its video-on-demand service until the matter could be heard in court. The episode demonstrated how valuable children's original programming had become as a bargaining asset in the Israeli television market.

Regulatory approval and the launch on yes

Because the Children's Channel was part of the yes basic package, replacing it required the approval of the Council for Cable and Satellite Broadcasting, which had to be satisfied that the new channel was an adequate substitute for the old one. After a long process that Globes described as a saga involving dramatic meetings, the council approved the change on 28 December 2016, only days before the switch. The approval came with conditions: the council stated that it had not been persuaded that the new channel, in its existing form, was a fully worthy substitute, and it required yes either to close the gaps between the two channels by increasing its investment in the new channel's original productions and in existing and future acquisitions, or, alternatively, to reduce the price of its basic package so that the price would reflect the gap. The new channel nevertheless launched on schedule. On 1 January 2017, yes KidZ went on air as the Children's Channel left the platform after sixteen years. From its first day, the channel presented a slate of original programmes, among them the talk and entertainment show Snaptok, the children's cooking programme Microchef, the youth drama Rosh Gadol in its new incarnation, and the entertainment and sketch programme OMG.

Original studio programmes and presenters

A defining feature of KidZ was its reliance on young presenters and on formats built around the social-media culture of its audience. During its first year, a group of hosts joined the channel who became closely identified with it: Sagie Breitner, Gaia Shalita-Katz, Ofer Ben Shabbat, Maor Harush, Noa Kirel and Omer Dror, among others. Shalita-Katz hosted Snaptok and the channel's special programmes between 2017 and 2020. Noa Kirel, already emerging as one of Israel's biggest young pop stars, presented the dance programme Lipstar together with Breitner and later starred in the channel's flagship drama. Breitner's credits on the channel included Lipstar, the holiday game show Leuf Al HaHag, the companion programme Sagie and the Swaggers, specials and the talent show HaKufsa, which he presented with Taylor Malikov. Omer Dror hosted Escape, a game show built around escape rooms. Ofer Ben Shabbat and Maor Harush, the comedy duo Ofer and Maor, fronted OMG throughout the channel's life. Microchef was hosted by Alina Levy and Erez Einav, while HaMatzad, an entertainment programme voiced by Yarden Harel, ran in 2017 and 2018. Later additions included Sliding with Stars, hosted by Maayan Rubin, the talent format HaKufsa, vlog-style programmes built around online creators such as Ben Zini and Taylor Malikov and around Kevin and Raz of the Hartza Gang, and the 2020 interview programme A Ad Tav, produced with the Frogi youth website and hosted by Moshe Abutbul. The presenter-led, studio-based part of the schedule gave the young channel a recognisable personality of its own rather than that of a simple archive service.

Expansion to HOT and the KidZ name

The second major change in the channel's short history came from the cable side of the market. On 27 July 2017, HOT announced that it would not renew its contract with the Children's Channel, and the RGE channel ended its broadcasts on HOT on 1 January 2018. HOT made the same move yes had made a year earlier: it replaced the Children's Channel with the Slutzky-produced channel. As Globes reported at the time, the arrangement was designed to work in a similar format to the old Children's Channel, with most productions made jointly and shown on both the yes and the HOT versions of KidZ, alongside exclusive productions made for one platform only. In preparation, the channel's logo had already been adjusted in November 2017 as part of a wider refresh of the yes brand. From January 2018 the channel was carried by HOT as well, and its name was shortened from yes KidZ to KidZ, the name it kept, with a further logo change in January 2019, until its closure. On the day it launched on HOT, 1 January 2018, the channel premiered its best-known original series, Kfula, starring Noa Kirel, and launched a morning strip called 8 BeKidZ. The unification meant that, for the first time, a single children's channel brand served the customers of both of Israel's traditional pay-television platforms.

Drama and comedy originals

Beyond its studio programmes, KidZ built a catalogue of scripted originals, divided between series shared by both platforms and series exclusive to one of them. Kfula, a youth drama in which Noa Kirel played alongside Dean Hafner, Tuval Shafir, Omer Dror, Ofer Shechter and Shalom Asayag, ran from 2018 to 2020 across five seasons and 114 episodes, and it also generated a companion programme, Kfulot, in 2019. Among the yes exclusives were Rosh Gadol: Rosh Hadash, the 2017 revival of the well-known youth drama, with a cast including Itzik Cohen, Yoav Rotman and Hani Nahmias; the sitcom Ahoti Kaftza Kita, which ran from 2017 to 2020; the science-fiction sitcom HaKlom HaGadol in 2017; Gibor Amiti, a drama series created by Uri Gross and starring Joy Riger and Ran Danker, in 2019; and the military-base sitcom Mahane Aba in 2020. The HOT exclusives included Training, a sports sitcom set in a sports boarding school, in 2018; HaTahana, a drama about a school Magen David Adom class, in 2019 and 2020; and Morobot, a sitcom about a robot who comes to teach at a school, also in 2019 and 2020. The two-platform structure allowed the channel to spread the cost of expensive scripted productions while still giving each operator exclusive titles with which to market its own service.

Acquired programming

Acquired series filled most of the KidZ schedule, and the channel bought from a wide range of international suppliers. Its animation library included Oggy and the Cockroaches, The Adventures of Tintin, Johnny Test, Cedric, Hank Zipzer and the eighth season of Winx Club, alongside titles such as Zeke's Pad, Zig and Sharko and Polly Pocket. In live action and telenovela-style programming it carried, among others, Floricienta and the Mondo TV series Heidi, Bienvenida a Casa, the Israeli version of the Heidi story produced in Argentina. A notable later deal brought Viacom's musical teen series Club 57, a Nickelodeon production of Viacom International Studios and the Rainbow Group, to Israeli screens through KidZ in 2020. Other acquisitions ranged from I Am Franky to the Israeli programmes that moved with the audience between channels, including series that had previously been associated with the Children's Channel itself. The mixture of evergreen animation, European and Latin American youth series and Israeli repeats was intended to match the breadth of the channel it had replaced, which was precisely the standard the regulator had set when approving the change.

Closure at the end of 2020

The end of KidZ was announced on 1 December 2020, when the Frogi website reported that the channel would finish broadcasting after four years and that Kan Hinuchit, the children's channel of the public broadcaster, would take its place on HOT. On 31 December 2020 the linear KidZ channel ended its broadcasts and stopped producing new content. The original productions that had already been made for the channel remained available to consumers through video-on-demand libraries, and the channel's activity on social networks continued until May 2021. On 5 January 2021, the channel's slot was formally replaced: on HOT by Kan Hinuchit and on yes by the Zoom channel. A number of KidZ productions, including Ahoti Kaftza Kita, Rosh Gadol and Kfula, continued to be shown on Zoom on yes, giving the channel's most successful series a broadcast life beyond the channel itself. The closure reflected the shifting economics of Israeli children's television, in which the public broadcaster's free children's channel and the global streaming services were squeezing the space for a mid-sized commercial children's brand owned by neither platform.

Place in Israeli television history

KidZ is remembered less for any single programme than for what its existence demonstrated about the Israeli television business. Its creation showed that a platform operator could replace even a sixteen-year-old flagship children's channel when a carriage relationship collapsed, provided the regulator was satisfied that subscribers would receive a comparable service. Its expansion to HOT a year later completed the removal of the RGE Children's Channel from both legacy platforms and created, briefly, a unified national children's brand across satellite and cable. Its original productions launched or consolidated the television careers of presenters and performers who were central to Israeli youth culture at the end of the 2010s, above all Noa Kirel, whose dual role as presenter and as the star of Kfula made her the face of the channel. And its closure after exactly four years, with its slot divided between a public channel and a rival commercial brand, marked the moment when the model on which it had been built, a platform-funded children's channel assembled from local originals and international acquisitions, ceased to be the centre of Israeli children's viewing. In that sense, KidZ was both a product of the pay-television era and one of its last distinctively Israeli creations.