After a quarter century, Nickelodeon’s preschool edutainment brand Noggin is being taken off air. Paramount Global enacted its latest round of layoffs Tuesday, impacting roughly 800 U.S.-based employees and a majority of the Noggin staff. Presented as an SVOD since 2015, the app will stop taking new subscribers and carry out a transition for current subs to Paramount+, which hosts Noggin content under the Nick Jr. brand.
Paramount Global was said to be shopping a majority stake in Noggin in early 2023 as a means of Noggin its VOD focus to devote more attention and resources to Paramount+ and Pluto TV. The kids’ (aimed at ages two to seven) streamer is home to animated favorites like PAW Patrol, Dora the Explorer, Blue’s Clues and Blaze and the Monster Machines among its 1,000-plus title library of videos, games and ebooks. The platform reported 2.5 million subscribers worldwide in 2019.
Noggin was created by Nickelodeon parent company MTV Entertainment and Sesame Street not-for-profit studio Sesame Workshop and launched on television on February 2, 1999. The original lineup included library series like Sesame’s The Electric Company and Ghostwriter and Nick’s Nick News and Doug, and soon brought in Bill Nye the Science Guy with new Noggin-specific segments. The cabler’s first original series was Phred on Your Head Show, featuring an animated host.
The channel — named for the slang for head/brain to emphasize its mission to inspire children to think, imagine, create and learn — expanded to international territories including the U.K. in 2006, Latin America in 2015 and more recently in France, Germany and Austria in 2020. Various websites and content blocks on Nickelodeon/Nick Jr. channels carried Noggin content over the years.
Industry watchers believe that the Paramount layoffs and other cost-cutting efforts presage a potential sale to another entertainment giant.
[Sources: Deadline, Kidscreen]
