A new study found that the pandemic has made television a bigger part of family life.

Research conducted for Yahoo and ad agency Publicis found that while people may have been isolated from friends and co-workers, they stuck together and gathered around glowing screens. 

The increased screen time at home created the opportunity for 64% of families to spend more time watching shows together and 49% are planning movie nights as a family.

Also: Future Today Study Highlights Family Co-Viewing on CTV

Families also spend more on TV buying hardware and content. The study found that 46% of family subscribed to new streaming services and 26% upgraded their internet services. Just 12% added new cable packages.

Kids got new gear to watch those services, with 47% getting tablets sooner than they would have had there been no pandemic, according to the survey, 36% getting new cell phones and 25% getting TV sets.

The screens in home also were used for kids to stay in touch with friends. Among the parents of children 12 to 17 years old, 44% said they encouraged kids to use devices to stay connected and 41% said they raised their kids’ screen time allowance. 

Parents reported behavior changes that marketers should be aware of, with 63% saying they’re doing more online shopping, 52% using apps to order takeout food and beverage, and 51% using store services such as pick up or home delivery. ■

Children’s-targeted programmers such as Disney Channel and Nickelodeon are rebooting popular kids shows from the 1990s and early 2000s in an effort to reach a new generation of kids, as well as their parents who grew up watching them on both traditional television and online streaming platforms. 

Shows with brand identity and familiarity have an advantage over new programs trying to establish themselves in a crowded multiplatform content universe, network executives and industry observers said. But such advantages don’t guarantee success for reboots, regardless of the original show’s popularity. 

“If you can provide an entertaining show to the current audience and use established characters in an established format that also attracts past viewers, then you’re on the right track,” TV analyst Bill Carroll said. “Yet in any show, whether it’s a reboot or an original, it has to stand on its own, whether it’s entertaining or whether the audience finds it attractive.”

As young viewers consume content across multiple platforms — kids 2 to 11 averaged 14 hours as week of viewing on connected-TV devices and 10 hours of live or time shifted TV viewing according to Nielsen’s Total Audience Report for third-quarter 2020 — content distributors are turning to more established intellectual properties (IP) to reach more kids, as well as their parents who grew up with such properties. 

“It absolutely helps break through the clutter and connect to audiences,” Paul DeBenedittis, Nickelodeon’s executive VP of programming and content strategy, said. “We have the ability to bring back properties so that parents who are now 40 years old can experience Nick with their children.”

Aggressive IP Revivers

Nickelodeon in particular has been aggressive in developing reboots and spinoffs for its older titles, having brought back this past May animated series Rugrats with new episodes featuring the original actor voices from the 1990s. On the live-action front, the network in June revived its 2010 series iCarly, featuring the original kid stars Miranda Cosgrove and Nathan Kress reprising their roles as adults. 

Both shows debuted on upstart streaming service Paramount Plus and not Nickelodeon, where the original shows ran. DeBenedittis said the streaming service allows the network to reach both fans who watch reruns of the original series on Paramount Plus as well as new viewers who may not be familiar with the franchise but are viewing other shows online. 

The strategy seems to be working. The iCarly reboot, whose June 17 debut reached 145,000 households within the live-plus-three-day window according to Samba TV, was recently renewed for a second season on Paramount Plus.

“We have an opportunity to reach a broader audience that might not be watching Nick and might not have children, but they’re watching Paramount Plus to see a title that they grew up with,” DeBenedettis said. “These titles generally have a strong affinity with audiences while at the same time they also have the ability to drive new audiences.” 

Disney Channel is preparing to revive one of its more popular animated titles, The Proud Family, with hopes it will follow in the footsteps of successful reboots of That’s So Raven (Raven’s Home) and High School Musical (High School Musical: The Musical: The Series). 

The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder will once again follow the exploits of an African-American family, led by teenage daughter Penny Proud. Original series creator and executive producers Bruce Smith and Ralph Farquhar will return for the reboot along with most of the cast members from the original show, which aired on Disney Channel from 2001 to 2005. Though no premiere date for The Proud Family: Louder and Prouder has been announced, it will be available on Disney Plus.  

Disney Branded Television president and CEO Gary Marsh said the multigenerational appeal of reboots provides a catalyst for co-viewing opportunities on multiple platforms. “There is a familiarity with the series among original fans, but the show has new stories to tell and new characters to introduce that will keep the original fans engaged and attract new ones,” Marsh said. 

Marsh pointed to the success of Disney Channel’s Raven’s Home, which finished its fourth season this past May as one of the network’s most-watched and most co-viewed shows. The series starring Raven-Symoné takes place years after the end of That’s So Raven, which ran on the channel from 2003 to 2007, with Raven’s then-teenage character now a divorced mother of preteen twins. 

“When Raven’s Home first launched, the nostalgia factor of seeing Raven-Symoné in her comedic element again appealed to fans of That’s So Raven, while attracting a whole new generation of fans in Disney Channel’s core 6-14 demo,” Marsh said. “What’s great about these titles is that they’re multigenerational and are great for co-viewing.”

The CW will look to capitalize on the success and popularity of Craig McCracken-produced Cartoon Network’s animated series The Powerpuff Girls, having green-lit a live-action version of the series. In The CW’s version, the three adolescent superheroes of the animated series that ran on Cartoon Network from 1998 to 2005 and again from 2016 to 2019, are 20-something women contemplating their roles as crime fighters. 

Carroll said reboots of kids-targeted shows such as Netflix’s Fuller House (based on ABC’s 1980’s sitcom Full House) have succeeded because the new series are able to update the original version to appeal to new viewers without totally alienating former viewers looking for the nostalgia of the original show. Fuller House, in which the kid stars from the original are now adults and drive the main storylines, ran for five seasons from 2016 to 2020.

“Time and time again it has been proven that if a reboot is well-done and it makes sense, then it works,” Carroll said. “If it’s just taking a concept that worked before and is not contemporized then it probably doesn’t work.”

Indeed, not every reboot idea successfully sees the light of day. Disney in 2019 announced plans for a revival of the 2000s Disney Channel series Lizzie McGuire, with original series star Hilary Duff reprising her lead role as an adult living in New York. But in a 2020 Instagram post Duff announced that the show would not go forward, saying that the “stars didn’t align” creatively for the much-anticipated reboot. 

Disney’s Marsh acknowledged the challenges in navigating actors, storylines and characters surrounding reboots. “It’s important to honor the heart and soul of the original series because it obviously holds a special place in the hearts of the fans,” Marsh said. “But it’s equally important to evolve and contemporize the characters and storytelling so that we invite new audiences in as well. With every project you start out to make, sometimes the stars align and other times they don’t and that’s OK.”

New ‘Under Wraps’ In Works

Disney is moving head with several other projects in the reboot arena, including a comedic remake of the network’s first ever original movie, Under Wraps, and a Doogie Howser M.D. reimagining featuring Andi Mack’s Peyton Elizabeth Lee as a 16-year-old prodigy juggling a budding medical career and life as a teen, according to Marsh. 

Nickelodeon is putting a new spin on the classic animated series The Smurfs, and a live-action reboot of 2000s animated series The FairlyOdd Parents is also in the works, DeBenedittis said. Other franchises such as Star Trek, Transformers and the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are also being primed for new projects. 

“We’re looking at additional content — both movies and series — that we could potentially deliver for the fan base and grow new audiences through both linear and streaming,” he said. “The different platforms offer us the ability to drive broader reach and engagement with beloved properties that fans love as well as introduce kids to these properties.” 

About 23% of U.S. TV viewers have used a co-viewing app this year, up from 20% in the quarantine year of 2020, according to Hub Entertainment Research. 

The finding, based on a survey of 2,519 U.S. consumers, suggests the long-anticipated convergence of social media and simple, passive act of watching TV might have finally arrived, in a format more simplistic than previously imagined. 

Not surprisingly, the behavior skews young--41% of viewers age 16-34 say they’ve used a co-viewing app, compared with 23% of those age 35-54 and only 3% of those 55 or older, Hub says. 

According to the survey, Amazon Watch Party is the most popular co-viewing app, but it also skews older and male. Viewers age 35-54 (57%) are more likely to use AWP than co-viewers age 16-34 (37%), and men (52%) more likely to use AWP than women (31%). 

The usage behavior, however, is favored by the young, with the 16-34 cohort being by far the biggest supporter of these apps. 

“Co-viewing apps and services are becoming increasingly important, no doubt driven in part by recent pandemic experiences,” said David Tice, senior consultant to Hub and co-author of the study. “Content distributors and streaming services that help enable this behavior will increase their appeal to young adults overall, and in particular young men. This is an important consideration with the advent of fully or partially ad-supported streaming services and the desirability of these key demos to advertisers.”

In a time of isolation that’s driving online video streaming skyward, it’s no surprise that one of the hottest new features is co-viewing: watching a show together, even when you’re alone.

Co-viewing can be a capacious term in the TV world. It includes that old-fashioned notion of a family gathering ‘round the electronic hearth, like a broadcast executive’s nostalgia dream of 1973. Amid the strictures of the pandemic, that kind of co-viewing has jumped notably this year, according to a Nielsen study done in the spring. 

Streaming video has been particularly popular for that kind of same-room co-viewing, given the flexibility it provides in finding a mutually acceptable show to watch together, Nielsen found. Nearly half of those on a streaming device are watching with someone else, while only about a third of those on linear TV are doing so. And co-viewing on streaming TV jumped 15% in March, the first month of the pandemic. 

Executives at WildBrain Spark, the digital arm of the British children’s programming company, said they’ve seen a big jump in families gathering, especially in the evening, around connected TVs and those with OTT devices to watch their shows. Particularly notable is how much of that viewing is done of their broadcast-length shows on YouTube. 

That vast video repertory, the second-most-watched on CTV according to Comscore, isn’t often thought of as a go-to spot for longer shows. But WildBrain’s programming library includes notable brands such as The Smurfs, Teletubbies, Peanuts, Moomin, and Inspector Gadget. There’s plenty of name-brand stuff for locked-down families to pick through. 

WildBrain Spark GM Jon Gisby said last month that with cooler weather coming and fewer entertainment alternatives available, the company expects even more growth in that viewing pattern: long-form shows, on big screens, even from platforms such as YouTube. 

For all the return to the digital hearth, however, not everyone’s able to share a show with those they love in person. 

We’re also seeing a flurry of efforts, both by the big streaming services and smaller third-party companies, to provide more connectivity in a disconnected time.

Disney Plus, for instance, just joined the ranks of major subscription VOD services with a built-in remote co-watching for its customers. GroupWatch launched in the United States in late September after trials in Australia, New Zealand and Canada. 

Also read: Disney Plus Launches GroupWatch Feature

The function works through the app on any device or the web, but doesn’t include video chat capabilities, a substantial omission for some people trying to both watch a show together, and watch each other doing it. 

With the launch, Disney Plus joins several competitors in offering some version of remote co-viewing. This summer, Amazon Prime Video added co-viewing. And Disney-owned Hulu previously added the capability. 

Third-party providers are also trying to meet the opportunity. 

Netflix Party, a Chrome browser extension, allows subscribers to watch the streaming king together, wherever they are. But because it’s a browser extension, there are limits: you need to be on a device that can run Google Chrome, which cuts out a lot of potential co-viewing opportunities. 

One of the most ambitious third-party efforts comes from Scener, a two-year-old Seattle startup that got its start in the LAUNCH incubator backed by O.G. streaming-video technology company RealNetworks. 

Scener already has deals to enable co-viewing of shows on 10 big streaming services, including Netflix, Hulu, Disney Plus, HBO Max, Amazon Prime Video, YouTube, Vimeo, Disney-owned Indian service Hotstar and Sony-owned Funimation. It also provides video chat for users across all those services, allowing for a much more immersive experience. 

Last week, Scener announced a $2.1 million seed round of funding, including an investment from the investment company of RealNetworks founder Rob Glaser, to help expand the service, especially for a new set of B2B customers, said COO Joe Braidwood. 

During the pandemic, the company found its service being pressed into duty by big live events that formally were held in person, such as San Diego Comic-Con and Fantastic Fest, the genre film festival from the Texas-based Alamo Drafthouse theater chain. 

Those bespoke live events—serving thousands or tens of thousands of simultaneous viewers with panels, screenings, trailers and video chat—have forced Scener to iterate quickly on its capabilities, and to provide a little more nuance and control, Braidwood said. 

With Fantastic Fest, for instance, they quickly found that many fans didn’t want video chat going during a big premiere. But for the midnight showing of a compilation of slasher-film highlights, with commentary between each scene from an Alamo Drafthouse programmer, the video chat very much was essential to the experience. 

“It’s a very genre-specific type of problem,” Braidwood said. The slasher highlights are the kind of online project that should feature “interactive content where you’re supposed to scream out and share.” 

Scener will devote some of its new resources to build out live-event functions like the ability to dial up a profanity filter for more family-oriented programming, and a ticketing function that can charge a few dollars for events. That latter is a way to quickly separate true fans from drop-in troublemakers, Braidwood said.

“We’re just beginning to explore what the B2B aspects of this look like,” Scener COO Joe Braidwood said. “We’re prioritizing what we do next. It’s a very interesting niche business model.”

Another business partner for Scener is RiffTrax, which was founded 14 years ago by the mischievous makers of the long-running Mystery Science Theater 3000 TV series, 

RiffTrax sells comedic commentaries that are overlaid, MST3K style, on top of a wide range of trashy genre films. The company’s makers quickly glommed onto Scener’s possibilities for their business, so much so that the company and its CEO David G. Martin both joined the funding round.

“We’ve been waiting our entire 14 years for this ‘perfect sync’ technology to exist in a watch-party environment and Scener is the first we’ve seen to achieve it,” said Martin. “We look forward to future RiffTrax Live events with over 100,000 people simultaneously watching and laughing along with a movie together on Scener.”

Kid chefs are serving up a broad audience plate for cable networks offering adolescent- themed cuisine shows.

From Fox’s kids-themed MasterChef Junior to FYI’s Man vs. Child: Chef Showdown to Food Network’s Chopped Junior, the kids cooking genre is providing flavorful content that delivers viewers across several demos, according to network officials.

“Part of the appeal for viewers is the wow factor of seeing young kids with such advanced skills for their age in the kitchen,” Gena McCarthy, executive vice president of programming and development for FYI, said. And sophomore series Man vs. Child: Chef Showdown is one of FYI’s most watched shows and skews younger than the network’s more traditional cooking shows.

Kid versions of popular cooking shows such as Chopped Junior not only reach fans of the original but also bring in younger viewers that may not be familiar with those older-skewing series.

NBCUniversal this fall will look to draw kids 2-11 and their parents to its Universal Kids network — a rebrand of preschool channel Sprout — with the October premiere of Top Chef Junior, a spinoff of Bravo’s long-running series Top Chef.

"We are fortunate to be able to tap into the equity of Bravo's Top Chef and evolve the format to deliver the experience kids expect from their content, and to have Top Chef's own Curtis Stone along with Vanessa Lachey - both parents of young kids - starring on the show makes it that much more authentic," said Deirdre Brennan, general manager of Universal Kids. 

Ratings That Really Cook
Food Network is enjoying ratings success from several kids-themed shows, including Chopped Junior which, in its fourth season, posted double-digit ratings increases during its first quarter 2017 run compared to the same period last year, according to the network.

In addition, Food’s Kids Baking Championship — which finished its third season this past March — was the most-watched program with respect to co-viewing in its time slot among cable networks, with nearly 30% of adults 25-54 watching with their kids, said network officials.

“Ultimately, our goal remains growing our core demo [adults 25-54], though when we hook the whole family at 8 p.m. with shows designed for A25-54 viewers that also attract kids, it’s a win-win and we keep the parents watching as the night progresses,” said Allison Page, general manager, U.S. programming and development for Scripps Networks Interactive, which owns Food Network.

Courtney White, senior vice president of programming for Scripps, said kids-targeted food shows retain the same format as their adult counterparts, but have the added appeal of featuring very talented and competitive preteens and teens who take cooking seriously.

“One of the biggest challenges is remembering that these kids are skilled, with a real passion for food, which deserves to be taken as seriously as any of our adult chefs — including not patronizing their exceptional talent with easier challenges and/or softer judging,” she said.

Maintaining Positive Tones
While the kids may rival the adults in the kitchen, the competitions on kids-themed shows such as MasterChef Junior or Chopped Junior are not nearly as dramatic and intense as their adult counterparts, which helps expand the brand’s audience base.

“Families can turn to these shows and feel very comfortable that they are going to get programming that’s not going to have a lot of negativity and the cutthroat competition approach,” said Isaac Holub, co-founder and executive producer for production company Lucky 8 TV, which produces Food's Kids BBQ Championship along with Turn Card Content. “They know its going to be an entertaining, positive experience.”

The traditional one-hour family drama genre, once a staple of primetime TV lineups but in recent years pushed to the backburner by darker, more provocative drama projects, is once again beginning to find its footing with the recent success of two freshman series.

Hallmark Channel’s Chesapeake Shores finished its inaugural campaign last month as the most-watched original scripted series in the network’s history, while broadcaster NBC’s This Is Us has launched this past September as one of the most watched new series of the 2016-17 television season.

TUGGING AT HEARTS

The two shows, with their heart-tugging optimism and relationship-themed plotlines, are going against the grain of today’s most popular scripted series which offer a darker, more sinister and pessimistic view of human nature. Nevertheless, the shows are tapping into an underserved audience of both older and surprisingly young viewers looking for more positive and uplifting programming options, programming executives said.

“There are a lot of great television shows out there but many are darker and edgier and have a supernatural twist,” Hallmark Channel executive vice president of programming Michelle Vicary said. “That’s a great television experience on other networks, but we found that there’s an audience for family dramas, if you do it right.”

Hallmark’s multigenerational family drama Chesapeake Shores, based on a novel series by Sherryl Woods, averaged 2.7 million viewers on a Nielsen live-plus-3 basis during its 10- episode run that ended last month, making it the most-watched original scripted series in network history.

Chesapeake Shores also finished as one of Hallmark Channel’s youngestskewing series, drawing more 18-49 year old female viewers than its other scripted content. Vicary attributed that youth appeal to the strength of Woods’s book franchise, as well as the well-written characters and storylines.

“Chesapeake Shores has proven to us that there is a bigger audience across the board for family dramas than one might think,” she said.

This Is Us, which follows a family of three kids — two siblings and an adopted child with the same birthday — throughout their childhood and adult lives, is arguably the surprise hit of the new television season. Through five episodes, its installments have posted the five highest ratings number among all telecasts of the Big Four networks’ 10 first-year dramas so far this season, according to network officials. The Oct. 25 episode averaged a season-high 8.7 million viewers.

Amy Winter, executive vice president and general manager of family-targeted network UP, believes that the success of This Is Us shows there is an audience yearning for more family dramas.

UP, which this past summer rebranded its service to focus on family-themed programming and acquired the rights to such family-themed dramas as Parenthood, will debut in 2017 its own one-hour family drama, Date My Dad, about three daughters who look to support their widowed father by searching for a companion for him.

“While they do have a certain soapiness to them, I would say that some of the stickiest plotlines that you ever see out there do relate to love and family and relationships that exist within the family,” Winter said. “Usually at the center of those dramas are people that feel like family to you, and you want to root for, and you end up picking your favorites.”

CO-VIEWING APPEAL

Winter also said that the family-drama genre appeals to viewers at the older end of the millennial demographic, age 25-34, who are settling down with families and seeking programming they can identify with to watch along with their kids.

“Some of these noisier, darker high-concept shows are definitely in the zeitgeist right now, but shows like This Is Us are proof that when you have quality storytelling, word of mouth will travel and people will come to it,” Winter said. “There’s also a misperception that the cooler, edgier and darker you go, the more you capture the younger side of this audience, but the quality storytelling in these one-hour dramas goes beyond something that might be more gimmicky.”

Nielsen, which has an agreement with Roku to measure video advertising on Roku TV devices and streaming players, said measurement data shows 27% of content viewed via Roku is viewed by two or more viewers at that sitting. Nielsen says that indicates advertisements could attain 30% more viewer impressions. Some genres had higher co-viewing rates than that: children's content was co-viewed 38% of the time and sports was co-viewed 28% of the time, Nielsen said.

The Nielsen item, published as a blog post with a chart, did not differentiate between streamed content, via services such as Amazon Prime and Netflix, that don't carry ads and content viewed on those platforms that does contain ads. In fact all kinds of content were measured, not just shows with ads. A Nielsen representative said the study used actual metered viewing data stemming from TV sets connected to Roku boxes in Nielsen's National People Meter (NPM) sample. It involved a month (May 2015) of data and included some 607,000 viewing instances.