Nickelodeon Hopes Its App Wins Hearts

By AMY CHOZICK

Published: February 19, 2013

Nickelodeon has spent the last two years asking 9- and 10-year-olds what they want to watch on the iPad. The result: Very little actual television.

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The Nick app features free games, interactive polls and slide shows floating against a bright orange background.

That response posed a problem and an opportunity for Nickelodeon, a top-rated children’s cable channel that is home to “SpongeBob SquarePants,” “Victorious” and “iCarly.” Instead of simply making its programs available on tablets, Nickelodeon designed its first app as a noisy, colorful smorgasbord of animated clips, irreverent music videos and the occasional deluge of the network’s trademark green slime. Or, as Nickelodeon executives describe it, the app is designed to be a “ginormous grid of everything Nick.”

As fun as it is supposed to be for children, the Nick app has serious implications for its parent company, Viacom, and for the entire television distribution business. The app represents the first attempt by a Viacom channel at TV Everywhere — the concept that paying customers can stream live and on-demand shows on all devices — that many television executives hope will keep viewers tied to their cable and satellite contracts. It is expected to be available in the Apple App Store on Thursday. 

The Nick app features free games, interactive polls and slide shows floating against a bright orange background. A less obvious feature also allows users to watch full-length Nickelodeon shows on tablets as long as they (or, more likely, their parents) authenticate that they are paying subscribers. 

Nick arrives late to the app store. A main rival, Disney, already offers authenticated apps for the Disney Channel and Disney Junior that allow children to stream shows like “Good Luck Charlie” and “Mickey Mouse Clubhouse” and to participate in interactive “appisodes.” 

Cyma Zarghami, president of the Nickelodeon Group, said she preferred to wait until the cable channel had more information about how its audience used mobile devices. Research showed children preferred to play games and watch short clips on apps, rather than catch up on complete episodes. Nickelodeon already has individual branded games available as apps. 

“TV Everywhere is a given. It’s not special anymore,” Ms. Zarghami said. “Being first wasn’t important to us. We took our time to combine these two ideas” of interactive games and snippets of shows.

A brief video instructs children to “grab an adult” to enter a password that shows they subscribe to Nickelodeon before gaining access to the last five episodes of series like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles,” “Big Time Rush” and “Kung Fu Panda: Legends of Awesomeness.” This fall, Nickelodeon will introduce a separate app for Nick Jr. intended to serve as an “interactive play date” for its preschool-age audience.

Nickelodeon’s strategy — based on extras rather than episodes — signals how Viacom may approach apps for its other cable channels, including MTV, Comedy Central and VH1. Until this week, Viacom had not introduced authenticated apps for its channels, unlike Time Warner’s HBO and its popular HBO Go app.

“This is a creative sandbox for kids but it’s also a creative sandbox for the company,” said Steve Youngwood, Nickelodeon’s executive vice president for digital. 

The Nick app represents an evolution in Viacom’s thinking about its audience. Nickelodeon has long been a powerhouse in children’s programming, but its ratings suddenly plunged in 2011. Viacom in part blamed Nielsen for not counting children who streamed shows via “unmeasured platforms” like Netflix. (The company also conceded that it had aging series like “SpongeBob” and “iCarly”.) 

Viewers who watch shows on the Nick app will not be counted in ratings data, but the cable channel can at least sell advertisements. Nickelodeon will introduce the app to marketers at its upfront next week in New York. 

The introduction of the Nick app comes as the channel’s ratings are slowly climbing back after the unexpected plunge that started in 2011. A daily average of 2.9 million viewers ages 2 to 11 watched Nickelodeon this month, up 12 percent from February 2012, according to Nielsen.

Ms. Zarghami said the Nick app could help the channel develop new series and stars, based on which clips, actors and characters drew the most attention. Nickelodeon commissioned 12 short films for the app, including one called “Dance Party in a Port-A-Potty” that featured meerkats partying in a portable restroom. Nickelodeon has greenlighted five for the channel. “Our aim is to get more content faster,” Ms. Zarghami said. 

Tablet use among children 11 years old and younger is projected to grow faster than almost any other age group. Half of households in the United States with children own a tablet and 70 percent have some sort of smart device, according to Nickelodeon’s research.

“The tablet has come of age particularly among our audience,” Mr. Youngwood said. 

Nickelodeon has struck deals with eight cable or satellite providers including Time Warner Cable, Verizon FiOS, Cablevision and DirecTV to make the streaming feature of its Nick app available in nearly 50 million homes. The nonstreaming offerings will be available to viewers who do not subscribe to those companies.

Paul Verna, a senior analyst at eMarketer, said the authentication model could pose challenges for Viacom. He pointed to the media company’s dispute with DirecTV this last summer, which prompted the satellite provider to suspend Viacom’s channels. 

“How do you explain to a little kid that your friend on Comcast can watch Nick Jr. and ‘iCarly’ on their iPad but you can’t?” Mr. Verna said.