Page 34 - The Channel Issue 2 2010

Malika Alouane, Director of Channels’ Programming at Al Jazeera Children’s Channel, has reason to smile. Both JCC – a Pan-Arab edutainment channel aimed at age group 7-15 – and Baraem TV, the first free-to-view preschool channel in the Arab world which she launched in January 2009 are winning accolades the world over – including 'Channel of the Year' at the 2009 AIBs – for its quality offerings on various platforms. Here she talks about her experiences and latest projects

CC is the first ever children's channel in the Arab world. In setting it up we learned a lot and that has helped us to launch Baraem and make it the success it is today. The pre-school Baraem is a completely new concept to the Arabic-speaking audience worldwide. Feedback from researchers and focus groups is very positive with requests to do more. Our main challenge today is to produce more pre-school content internally and bring more of an Arabic flavour from within this region to the audience.

JCC and Baraem address two distinct age groups – what difficulties does that bring for the programming strategy?

There is no major difficulty except with the age group 6 to 8; they sit a bit in between. We have eight year olds who are watching Baraem and love it, and six year olds who watch certain content on JCC. I see more of a challenge with the older age group. When we try to speak to 7-15's there is a huge difference in tastes, liking of programmes and content and even the 'personality' of the channel, and the scheduling part is challenging because you can never speak to all of them on prime time. So to decide

what content for what age group goes on prime time on certain days, that is quite difficult. And coping with the time zone differences will always be a challenge.

How much of your content is produced in-house?

For JCC we are fine with 60% in-house which is one of the highest ratios in children's TV, but for Baraem we are looking over the next couple of years to add 10% to get us to 25%. We also have quite an active acquisitions department, and we make sure we don't have redundant content between what is bought in and what's produced and commissioned.

What's behind the move to partner with NHK in a huge-scale science entertainment series?

Factual entertainment is missing on quite a few children's channels around the world. We have partnered with NHK before and science was always an attractive area for a joint effort. We said we wanted something really impressive, not just a conventional science magazine. So we came up with this idea of grand scale experiments – it works for children, it works for a 13 year old, and it works for a grown-up too. The series, Discover Science, is going on air on JCC in September.

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