CITV: Children’s TV channel will shut in September following launch of ITVX Kids

Children’s TV channel CITV – liked for teenagers’ classics together with Danger Mouse and Rainbow – will shut subsequent month.

It is making approach for ITVX Kids, the youngsters’s service on ITV‘s new streaming service ITVX, which launched earlier this summer time.

ITV informed Sky News: “As a consequence of this new streaming approach and responding to the changing ways children and their parents are increasingly accessing content, the CITV broadcast channel will close after the summer holidays on 1st September.”

ITVX changed ITV Hub in December 2022, with the general public service broadcaster making strikes to compete with streaming giants together with Netflix and Amazon Prime Video.

Children’s ITV launched in 1983, sitting throughout weekday late afternoons, with the digital CITV channel following in 2006.

Aimed at children aged 5 to 12, a few of its best-loved exhibits embrace My Parents Are Aliens, Fraggle Rock, The Worst Witch, Children’s Ward, Raggy Dolls, Woof, Art Attack and Horrid Henry.

Classics which have earned cult standing over time embrace Ghost Train, Fun House, Knightmare, Press Gang, Danger Mouse, Trap Door and Count Duckula.

Pre-school hits included Rainbow, Rosie And Jim and Button Moon.

Actor Matthew Kelly was the primary presenter on the channel in 1983, showing within the hyperlinks between the exhibits, whereas a lot later in 1993, Stephen Mulhern and Danielle Nicholls turned the hosts of the channel.

CITV celebrated its thirtieth anniversary in January, with an “Old Skool” schedule of programmes all through the weekend.

ITV says ITVX Kids will “supercharge” its presence in streaming, doubling its present children’ content material providing with greater than 100 exhibits and over 1,000 hours of programming – together with comedy, gameshows, reside motion, animation and sport.

It can be aimed toward each school-age and pre-school age kids, the broadcaster mentioned.

Existing favourites, together with Lloyd of the Flies, Lily’s Driftwood Bay, Claude, Mumfie, Mystery Lane and The Rubbish World of Dave Spud, will all be obtainable on ITVX Kids.

The animated sequence of Mr Bean, Teletubbies Let’s Go, Sooty and Bob The Builder can even be there.

Click to subscribe to Backstage wherever you get your podcasts

ITVX has additionally mentioned the service’s ambition is to have all of its kids’s content material subtitled, and round 20% of it audio described.

ITV will preserve its LittleBe pre-school phase on ITVBe and also will supply some kids’s content material within the early mornings on ITV2 from September.

Recent BARB viewing information has proven that whereas the typical quantity of broadcast TV minutes of youngsters’s TV channels watched by 4-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 viewing habits for younger individuals.

The BBC has additionally introduced plans to cease broadcasting its kids’s CBBC channel – house to exhibits together with Blue Peter and Newsround – on TV sooner or later.

Despite the rise in on-line viewing, some have argued that not all kids have entry to the web.

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

The Young Audiences Content Fund – a £44m fund designed to assist help kids’s programming on channels together with ITV and Channel 5 – was scrapped by the federal government final 12 months.