2011 logo.
NBCUniversal Media, LLC is an American mass media and entertainment conglomerate owned by Comcast and headquartered at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Midtown Manhattan, New York City.
NBCUniversal is the owner of the Sprout brand. Comcast acquired the NBC network from GE in 2009, and when it attained 51% and thereby the control of newly reformed NBCUniversal two years later in 2011, they made a deal for the former company to acquire all of the latter's products by 2013, including Sprout. By 2012, they owned 40 percent of the channel.[1] Also in 2012, NBC Kids, a Saturday morning block of Sprout shows, launched on the main NBC channel, replacing the existing Qubo block (another children's channel, which NBCUniversal owned at the time), and was replaced by The More You Know in 2016. Qubo continued as a channel, owned by Ion Media (now itself owned by E.W Scripps), and shut down on February 28th, 2021. Ironically enough, Justin Time, one of the shows on NBC Kids, premiered on Qubo in January 2021, a month before the channel's closure.
Sesame Workshop and HiT Entertainment (now owned by Mattel) sold their interests of Sprout to Comcast, which meant NBCUniversal acquired all of Sprout by November 2013, leading to "PBS Kids" being removed from the channel's name. The buyout caused children's channel KidsCo and programming block Syfy Kids to shut down.[2] That same month, Sprout reached 60 million homes, thanks to Time Warner Cable expanding its carriage of the channel.
In 2016, NBCUniversal acquired a majority stake in Dreamworks, which meant that Noddy: Toyland Detective, a series based on a character whose previous show aired on Sprout for some time, was set to air on Sprout. In April 2017, Sprout's then-new president Deirdre Brennan (formerly of Canada's Corus Entertainment) announced Sprout was going away and would be morphed into Universal Kids on September 9, 2017. This was due to NBCUniversal cable networks dealing with declining TV ratings across the sector because of the popularity of the streaming, Sprout being one of NBCU's lowest-rated cable channels with a revenue of $102 million in 2016.[3] A Sprout block aired on Universal Kids from 3AM to 5PM ET until early 2018, when the name was removed.
Notes
- NBCUniversal and PBS worked on Curious George together. The movie that preceded the show, which premiered the same year, aired on Sprout during Summer of Sprout Family Movie Night in 2015, but not the show.
References
- ↑ PBS KIDS Sprout expands its reach
- ↑ KidsCo to close following NBCU Sprout deal
- ↑ The Philadelphia Inquirer, May 13, 2017, page A07