Building a hit preschool show has never been harder. Commissioning decisions are more cautious, platforms are pulling back on marketing support, and the window between a show’s debut and its irrelevance is shrinking. For studios that still rely on broadcasters to carry their properties, that pressure is existential.

John Rice has been navigating that tension for more than two decades. As CEO and Executive Producer of JAM Media, the Dublin and Belfast-based animation studio he co-founded in 2002, John has built children’s brands licensed across 130 territories and translated into more than 30 languages. The studio’s credits include “Baby Jake” for CBeebies, “Little Roy” for CBBC and CBeebies, and current productions with Nickelodeon and Amazon Prime. 

In February, he brought those lessons to Kidscreen Summit 2026, where he used JAM’s latest property, “BeddyByes,” as a case study in how preschool IP can be built to last.

“Children’s animation today requires a much closer relationship between creativity and strategy than it once did,” John says. “Creating a show is only the starting point. The real challenge is building something that can live across multiple platforms, travel internationally, and remain meaningful to families over time.”

The Broadcaster Model No Longer Carries the Load

When JAM Media launched in 2002, the path to building a children’s brand was relatively linear. Secure the right broadcaster, get the show on the right channel, and let the platform do the heavy lifting. That model shaped how studios thought about development, production, and rights for the better part of two decades.

John argues that the model is no longer functional. “When we started, broadcasters were the primary drivers of brand growth,” he says. “Today, the ecosystem is far more distributed. Linear television, streaming platforms, YouTube, social media, and retail all play different roles in how a children’s property grows.”

That distribution has not been accompanied by a corresponding increase in resources. One of the most persistent signals at Kidscreen this year, according to John, was the widening gap between what platforms expect from producers and what they’re willing to fund. 

“There was a clear awareness that the economic environment had changed,” he says. “Budgets are tighter and commissioning decisions are more cautious and risk-averse.”

The consequence is a structural shift in who bears responsibility for audience development. Studios that once handed off marketing to their broadcast partners now find themselves managing that work independently, often without the budgets to do it well. 

“There is a real opportunity in that shift,” John notes, but he’s clear-eyed about the risk. “Studios that build direct relationships with audiences and develop their own digital ecosystems will likely be more resilient over time.” Those who don’t are increasingly exposed.

‘BeddyByes’ and the Case for Emotional Usefulness

At Kidscreen, John centered his session on “BeddyByes,” a preschool property built around the bedtime routine. The choice was deliberate. Rather than developing a show first and then asking where else it might live, JAM designed “BeddyByes” around a moment that families experience every evening.

“The idea grew from observing how emotionally charged bedtime can be for young children and their parents,” John explains. “Instead of simply creating a preschool show that happened to take place at night, we built the series around that daily routine.”

The practical effect is that the property arrives with a built-in platform strategy. As John notes, bedtime creates natural touchpoints across television, audio, consumer products, and digital content. A song, a plush toy, an app, a nightlight: all of them connect to the same emotional context without requiring a forced brand extension.

The broader principle, which John described as the session’s central argument, is that emotional usefulness scales in ways that entertainment alone does not. “Entertainment alone can be fleeting,” he says, “but when a show becomes part of a family’s routine, it can develop into something much more durable.”

That durability, John adds, is what separates children’s properties that generate short licensing cycles from those that compound value over the years.

Multi-Platform Thinking Has to Start at Development, Not After

One of the clearest operational conclusions John draws from building children’s IP in the current environment is that platform strategy can no longer be treated as a post-production decision. 

For most of the industry’s history, a show’s digital life was considered after its broadcast run was established. John argues that such a sequence is now too slow and too costly.

“Development teams need to think about how a property might translate to short-form digital content or social media,” he says. “Distribution partners need to consider marketing timelines and retail opportunities. Consumer products teams need to understand the tone, purpose, and identity of the brand.” Each of those conversations, he adds, needs to happen before production begins.

At JAM, that means asking a specific set of questions at the earliest stage of development. Can the characters and worlds translate across different formats? How does the property hold up in a 90-second YouTube clip and a 22-minute episode? What does the visual identity need to communicate at thumbnail scale?

“Multi-platform thinking has to be part of the DNA of a project rather than something added later,” John says. Studios that treat digital distribution as an afterthought are effectively building properties that require expensive retrofitting, or that simply don’t travel beyond their original platform.

The Creator Economy has reinforced this point in a way that traditional children’s media could not ignore. John acknowledges that the attention audiences give to YouTube creators and social-first content has demonstrated something significant about how engagement actually works. 

“Viewers respond strongly to authenticity, consistency, and voice,” he says. “Sometimes more than to scale or production budget.” That reality is a challenge for studios built around high-cost production pipelines, but it also clarifies what the foundational investment should be.

Rights Ownership Is Where Long-Term Value Lives

If a multi-platform strategy is the operational challenge, rights ownership is the structural one. As children’s brands expand into digital ecosystems, the question of who controls a property’s presence across platforms becomes increasingly consequential. For independent studios, it is increasingly urgent as well.

John is direct about the stakes. “As children’s brands expand across digital platforms, independent studios need to retain meaningful rights and presence around their properties,” he says. “Without that, it becomes difficult for creators to participate fully in the long-term value of the worlds they build.”

As streaming platforms have grown more powerful, the terms they negotiate with content partners have often shifted in ways that constrain how studios can manage and monetize their IP over time. Rights frameworks that made sense under traditional broadcast arrangements may be poorly suited to a world where a property’s most valuable touchpoints are digital.

John identifies rights as the first of three areas where discipline is required to build a franchise that lasts. 

The second is design coherence: “Everything from the visual identity to the emotional tone of the brand needs to remain consistent whether a child encounters it on television, online, or through consumer products.” 

The third is frequency of engagement, which John describes as a brand appearing “repeatedly in a child’s daily life, or even better: their imagination.”

Those three conditions, taken together, describe something close to a compounding asset. Each touchpoint reinforces the others. The consumer product makes the television character more vivid; the digital short drives attention back to the streaming platform.

What the Industry Gets Wrong About International Scale

One of the persistent myths in children’s media, according to John, is that production quality is the primary driver of international reach.

“The brands that travel well tend to have clear emotional foundations, simple storytelling structures, and visual identities that are immediately recognisable,” he says. Complexity, whether in narrative or visual design, tends to limit a property’s ability to cross cultural and linguistic boundaries.

From a business perspective, the same logic applies to rights structures. “The brands that scale internationally are also supported by rights frameworks that allow them to move quickly into new markets and platforms without constant renegotiation.” Properties that require elaborate deal-making every time they enter a new territory lose the speed advantage that timing-sensitive markets demand.

John’s observation from Kidscreen is that this clarity is now a competitive differentiator rather than a baseline assumption. As the market contracts and commissioning becomes more selective, properties that can demonstrate clear international potential from the pitch stage will attract better partners and faster deals.

Building for What Comes Next

John is measured when it comes to predictions. The market he describes is one where long-term thinking is necessary precisely because short-term signals are unreliable. Platforms that seem dominant today have shown they can quickly shift priorities. Rights structures that seemed generous at signing have a way of becoming liabilities.

What he is confident about is the direction of the opportunity for studios willing to build direct audience relationships and manage their IP with discipline. “Studios that build direct relationships with audiences and develop their own digital ecosystems will likely be more resilient over time,” he says.

For JAM, that resilience is being built through properties like “BeddyByes,” which are designed from the start to generate value across multiple platforms and product categories, rather than depending on a single broadcast partner to carry the brand.

The broader industry signal John took from Kidscreen is that pragmatic conversations about ownership, financing, and marketing responsibility are now as central to the business as the creative ones. 

“Those conversations may be less glamorous,” he says, “but they are central to building sustainable companies and sustainable creative ecosystems.”