For anyone older than 2 years old, the team deploys a whimsically named tool: the Distractatron. It’s a small TV screen, placed a few feet from the larger one, that plays a continuous loop of banal, real-world scenes — a guy pouring a cup of coffee, someone getting a haircut — each lasting about 20 seconds. Whenever a youngster looks away from the Moonbug show to glimpse the Distractatron, a note is jotted down. (View Highlight)
Farm.” (View Highlight)
“The top 100 shows that our kids were spending two or three hours a day watching were no-names, not traditional entertainment studios,” Rechtman said. “These were people who would write a narrative, get some folks in Canada to make the animation and some people in East London to handle the music. Five years later, they had a phenomenon that kids around the world were watching.” (View Highlight)
Shows at Moonbug are honed in ways that leave little to chance, and audience research commences long before any episode gets near the Distractatron. A data and analytics team sifts constantly through YouTube numbers to determine exactly what resonates. Should a girl wear black jeans or blue jeans? Should the music be louder or softer? Should the bus be yellow or red? Yellow, is the answer. (View Highlight)
Spend a few hours at Moonbug and you realize that parents who want to separate their kids from the company’s shows are doomed to fail. Of course, it’s moms and dads who generally hit “play” on these videos, suggesting that many either like them or have surrendered to them. Is that so terrible? Jordy Kaufman, who runs the Babylab research facility at Swinburne University of Technology in Melbourne, Australia, said the impact of screen time on malleable young minds is “a big question without clear answers.” There’s a tendency, Dr. Kaufman said, to assume that screens are bad for infants because humans didn’t evolve with them. And the way that shows are tweaked for maximum addictiveness can make them seem like the audiovisual answer to junk food. That said, it’s better for a child to experience something rather than nothing, he added, and given that youngsters will mature in a world where screens are ubiquitous, watching videos might help prepare them to navigate life. (View Highlight)