CITV – the channel that gave us Fraggle Rock, Danger Mouse and Rainbow – has left our terrestrial screens. CBBC – dwelling of Blue Peter and Newsround – plans to observe.

Meanwhile real-term funding in youngsters’s TV by public service broadcasters has dropped by 30% within the final 10 years.

And whereas Sky has bucked the development by launching an advert free children channel, general, the way forward for children TV is wanting bleak.

But figures present younger persons are nonetheless watching TV – albeit another way. Recent BARB viewing knowledge exhibits that whereas the common quantity of broadcast TV minutes of kids’s TV channels watched by four-year-olds per week has declined by 62% since 2019, viewing has risen by 30% in the identical interval, demonstrating the “streaming first” development in youngsters’s viewing habits.

So, if children are ditching linear viewing in favour of streaming, some would possibly say that public service broadcasters transferring their content material on-line is smart. Others would rightly argue that not all youngsters have entry to the web.

And then there’s the query of what children are literally watching on-line. It’s an “explosion” of alternative the longest-serving feminine presenter of Blue Peter, Konnie Huq, does not assume it is essentially a superb factor.

Huq tells Sky News: “Kids will all the time go for the most important, quickest dopamine hit… We dwell in a world of immediate gratification tradition and really delayed gratification is significantly better for happiness and psychological wellbeing in the long run.

“And kids, obviously they’re not old enough to always make the right judgement calls.”

Huq – who’s a mother-of-two herself and now works as a youngsters’s writer and screenwriter – recognises the wants for presidency laws to carry streaming firms to account for the content material they’re placing out. But she additionally recognises the constraints of individuals attempting to regulate a seemingly infinite internet.

She says: “It’s hard for laws, legislation, parents, schools, and the control culture to keep up with the changes that are going on.

“So, it is vital to just remember to know what your child is seeing, as a result of on YouTube, as an illustration, your baby might be watching one factor, however then completely different solutions pop up unselected, unbeknownst to you. So, a number of programmes hop away might be one thing that you simply won’t be comfortable together with your baby watching.”

Subscribe to the Sky News Daily wherever you get your podcasts

The Online Safety Bill – a brand new set of legal guidelines to guard youngsters and adults on-line – is because of come into regulation later this yr.

And on the Royal Television Society Convention earlier this week, the Culture Secretary Lucy Frazer introduced new plans to deliver unregulated on-line channels beneath Ofcom content material guidelines on conventional TV to make sure youngsters and weak viewers are protected against inappropriate or dangerous materials.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport instructed Sky News: “The shows we watch as children shape the way we see the world, staying with us forever.

“From Thomas The Tank Engine to Shaun The Sheep and Horrible Histories, the UK is dwelling to a number of the world’s greatest youngsters’s exhibits. Over 845 children programmes have benefitted from the federal government’s beneficiant animation and kids’s tax reliefs, elevated on this yr’s funds, resulting in greater than a billion kilos of funding.

“The upcoming Media Bill will require mainstream on-demand streaming services to follow a new video-on-demand code protecting children from harmful or inappropriate content and we’re consulting on bringing unregulated online TV channels under Ofcom’s rules to deliver consistent protections.”

However, with funding in children TV at its lowest degree since 2012 (Ofcom’s Media Nations Report discovered that real-terms funding in youngsters’s TV by public service broadcasters fell from £114m in 2013, to £80m final yr) many would argue that funding simply is not sufficient.

Spending on authentic child’s content material within the UK has been slashed following the 2006 ban on promoting junk meals to youngsters.

And the Young Audiences Content Fund – a £44m fund designed to assist assist youngsters’s programming on channels together with ITV and Channel 5 – was scrapped by the federal government final yr.

Former CBeebies collection producer Jon Hancock, who’s now managing director of youngsters and household manufacturing firm Three Arrows Media, calls the ditching of the fund “a difficult pill to swallow”, significantly as a result of it was such “a monumental success”.

Set up by the federal government, and administered by the BFI, the fund was created to assist stimulate extra commissioning of UK-specific content material in public service broadcasters outdoors of the BBC (which is funded by the licence charge).

The BAFTA-winning producer says the fund “helped the likes of Channel Five commission some fantastic award-winning content and to have that scrapped as it was 18 months ago was a devastating blow to the children’s industry”.

Huq too additionally says the lack of authentic, typically boundary pushing content material, is a blow to British youngsters’s viewing.

“Kids programming has often been ahead of the curve, before grown up programming has even caught up with it. And you know, that comes to so much diversity, when you’re looking at stuff like gay rights, things you wouldn’t necessarily assume kids TV even touched with a barge pole or had a hand in, kids TV was always at the forefront.”

As for BBC‘s plans to cease terrestrial broadcasting of its youngsters’s channel CBBC – dwelling to exhibits together with Blue Peter and Newsround – sooner or later, Huq feels the broadcaster might be lacking a trick.

“There’s less and less of these shared viewing experiences, which is why I think some of these Pixar films do so well these days, in that teatime viewing isn’t really a thing and everyone seems to just be watching their own thing on their own device. There is no family viewing as such.”

The BBC instructed Sky News: “We have said we won’t close any of our children’s channels before 2025 at the earliest, and we will maintain them for as long as they deliver value, and our audience needs them.

“Children’s content material is a precedence for the BBC and we’re the most important investor of authentic, culturally related British content material for ages 0-12 – greater than another streamer or broadcaster within the UK and we nonetheless have the 2 main linear channels for them.”

Read extra from Sky News:
Family sues state governor after student suspended over dreadlocks
Manchester’s Bee Network buses roll out as part of ‘symbolic’ public ownership plan

So, whereas Bob The Builder and Horrid Henry have been forcibly evicted from their CITV terrestrial dwelling, and plonked into ITVX Kids, Blue Peter at the least has a short lived reprieve, and will not weighing anchor fairly but.

Time will inform if the evolution of youngsters TV to on-line will crush its artistic spark or whether or not the problem of standing out in a crowded market will encourage revolutionary new exhibits and approaches – a brand new golden age of kids’s TV.

But as children develop into the curators of their very own content material – the nice, unhealthy and ugly – would possibly we do effectively to think about whether or not we’re handing over an excessive amount of accountability to our youngest – and arguably most vital – viewers to eat no matter, wherever and at any time when they need?

If you’re a parent or caregiver – or just love children’s TV – you can find Sky’s ad-free, 24-hour Sky Kids channel on Sky Q, Stream, Glass, and NOW.