Dailymotion’s France EVP Martin Rogard tells Les Echos the Dailymotion Kids Plus package, will host a library of over 1,000 videos after acquiring licenses from producers, who will be paid according to subscriber numbers, including Inspector Gadget maker Cookie Jar.

The launch is interesting for three reasons:

1. It shows Dailymotion is searching for more non-advertising income.
2. It further illustrates that operators are attracted to chargeable kids’ content.
3. It comes as Dailymotion’s ownership is likely to change in the next few months.

1. Dailymotion fortunes

Dailymotion recently tied up with Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde’s Flattr system to allow viewers to make micropayment donations to video creators they value.

But that pales against a full paid video strategy, which is ramping up. Dailymotion is likely to follow up its kids’ package with further categories including movies, Rogard tells Les Echos:

“We’re starting to educate our partners on the subject. Systematically, we will propose a mix of free and paid content. For us, it is important to walk on our own two feet.”

2. Kids boom

Netflix recently carved out its kids section with a separate UI. Amazon recently launched an unlimited kids content strand atop Amazon Prime. Each clearly believes  that on-demand cartoons and other shows are assets modern parents will happily pay for.

And why not? Prospects for kids content payment are healthy. FT:

“A study of 2,200 iPad-owning parents in the US and the UK, carried out by Kids Industries, found that parents downloaded an average of 27.2 apps for their children each year, spending about $100 in total.”

3. Investment coming

Today, Orange owns 49 percent of Dailymotion following its €61 million 2011 investment. When it invested, the telco also took an option to buy the remaining 51 percent. That right must be exercised by the looming spring 2013.

Although Orange may soon do so, such a deal would not be forever, 01net reports:

“Orange does not intend to stay a 100 percent shareholder of the site for long.

“The telephone company is looking for a new shareholder, and it has already mandated two banks — Messier, Maris & Associés of France and Raine of America.

“One avenue under consideration is to find a U.S. shareholder which would help to develop Dailymotion overseas.”

The implication here is that Dailymotion’s venture backers want out, and that, in their absence, Orange does not want full long-term ownership either.

Hulu Kids comes with shows from PBS, Nickelodeon and Lionsgate, and the content is sorted by age groups. The total number of shows listed on the section currently stands at 43. A spokesperson confirmed that Hulu is working on bringing Hulu Kids as a separate content section within the Hulu Plus app to additional devices.

The new Hulu Kids section is noteworthy for two reasons: First of all, Hulu is obviously taking a page from Netflix’s playbook here. Netflix launched its own kids section on the web last summer, and has since started to bring the section to a number of mobile and connected devices. The main difference between the two offerings is that Netflix actually changed its design for the kids section to make it more visually appealing and easier to navigate for kids, whereas Hulu just relies on its recently relaunched web UI.

But Hulu Kids is also interesting for another reason: Making this kind of content exclusively available to Hulu Plus subscribers shows that Hulu is starting to put a much bigger emphasis on its paid offering, and slowly deemphasizing the free Hulu.com website in the process. The fact that these kids shows are available ad-free is good news for parents who don’t want their kids confronted with advertising, but it’s also a sign that Hulu is moving towards becoming a more direct competitor for Netflix, which has always been ad-free.

In its latest “quick report” (PDF), the Cooney Center studied 32 child-parent pairs. The kids were all between 3 and 6 years old. Half the pairs read a print book and a regular e-book and the other half read a print book and an enhanced e-book (defined as an e-book with “enhanced multimedia experiences” like games and other interactive features, and the focus of reading apps like Scholastic’s Storia and Ruckus Reader).

Kids who read enhanced e-books remembered “significantly fewer narrative details than children who read the print version of the same story.”

And “both types of e-books, but especially the enhanced e-book, prompted more non-content related actions (e.g., behavior or device focused talk, pushing hands away) from children and parents than the print books.” This will be familiar to anyone who has ever used an iPad with a kid (or adult) and pointed out a cool iPad-related feature.

The Cooney Center recommends that “parents and preschool teachers should choose print or basic e-books to read with children if they want to prioritize literacy-building experiences over ones intended ‘just for fun,’” and says enhanced e-book designers should “exercise caution when adding features to enhanced e-books, especially when those features do not directly relate to the story.”

It also notes that enhanced e-books can be a good tool to “prompt less motivated young readers toward engagement when they might otherwise avoid text altogether.”

via Digital Book World

USAID funded the Worldreader Ghana study and independent firm ILC Africa did the research. iREAD “involved the wireless distribution of over 32,000 local and international digital books using Kindle e-readers to 350 students and teachers at six pilot schools in Ghana’s Eastern Region between November 2010 and September 2011.”

The full results are here (PDF). Some findings:

• Kids learned to use e-readers quickly even though 43 percent of them had never used a computer before. Also, not surprisingly, they were quick to discover “the multimedia aspects of the e-reader, such as music and Internet features.” (Kindle has an experimental web browser and can play MP3s.) Worldreader is “exploring ways to limit functions on the e-reader such as music” so that kids don’t get distracted during class, but points out that e-readers can also be a useful “bridge” device for students who’d never used a computer before.
• Near-zero theft. Only two e-readers (out of 600) were lost in the whole study, partly because “community involvement was encouraged through e-reader pledges, community outreach programs, and support from community leaders.”
• Kids got access to way more books. Before the study, primary-school students (whose average age was 11) had access to an average of 3.6 books at home. Junior-high students (average age 13.5 years) had access to an average of 8.6 books at home and high-school students (average age 16.6 years) access to an average of 11 books (mostly textbooks they had to buy for school.) With the e-reader program, kids had access to an average of 107 books, including books Worldreader “pushed” onto the Kindles as well as free e-books that kids downloaded themselves.
• Primary school students’ test scores improved, but effects on older kids were less clear. The reading scores of primary-school students who received e-readers increased from 12.9 percent to 15.7 percent, depending on whether they got additional reading support. That was an improvement of 4.8 percent to 7.6 percent above the scores of kids in control classrooms without e-readers. But results for older kids were mixed: “Student reading was affected almost exclusively at the primary level, and not at the junior and senior levels. This conclusion supports external data that students are most affected by reading interventions at the primary school stages between the ages of 4 and 10.”
• Students sought out access to international news. “Amazon data revealed that students were downloading The New York Times, USA Today, and El País etc., demonstrating that students want to access a wide range of reading materials that were previously inaccessible.”
• Some teachers worried kids became too dependent on the e-readers.  ”For example, one teacher stated that students thought that everything on the e-reader was the ‘absolute truth.’ He had to correct them by  explaining that the e-books may contain mistakes just as paper books do. Teachers also observed that some students have started to favor classes that use the e-reader and neglect classes that do not.”
• Kids shared their e-readers with their families and friends. Students, even primary schoolers, got to take their e-readers home at night and many reported sharing the devices. Kids in the study had an average of five siblings, so “the e-reader’s reach potentially extended to many people beyond the device’s owner.” Some kids whose parents were illiterate read to their parents from their e-readers.
• Kindles break too easily. Worldreader had not predicted how many Kindles would break: 243 out of 600, or 40.5 percent. Each time an e-reader broke, Worldreader sent it back to Amazon to conduct “a post-mortem analysis.” Turns out “fragile screens are the main weakness” and Amazon is working on Kindles with reinforced screens (at the same cost), which started shipping to Ghana in October 2011. Plus Worldreader is providing more rugged cases for the Kindles and providing more instruction on how to use them (don’t sit on it, for instance).
• The program appears cost-effective. Worldreader estimates that “for the years 2014-2018, using a calculation focused strictly on the provisioning of textbooks, the e-reader system would cost only $8.93-$11.40 more per student over a 4 year period [$0.19 to $0.24 per month] than the traditional paper book system.” That calculation is made with the assumptions that e-reader prices will fall and e-readers will become more rugged (so they break less). And of course, e-readers give students access to many books, not just textbooks.

Ruckus Reader titles can be downloaded individually, or parents can buy access to the whole library for $24.99 for six months. The first title in a series is free; after that, titles are $3.99 each or 2 for $5.99. For now, Ruckus Reader offers 25 titles — a mixture of interactive “iReaders” (enhanced e-books with video and games), straight e-books and “vidReaders” (video books narrated by celebrities like Meryl Streep and Robin Williams). Ruckus CEO Rick Richter, formerly president of the children’s division at Simon & Schuster, told me the company expects to include around 500 titles by the end of the year.

In addition to the brand-related content it developed itself, Ruckus is partnering with other book publishers to deliver e-books as well. The first partnership is with Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, which is providing Curious George titles. Richter said other “major publishers” are “lined up.”

How do your kid’s reading skills stack up?

“Right now, 1 in 4 kids has access to an iPad,” Richter said. “In 70 percent of households where an iPad is resident, the child has access. In 40 percent of households, kids use the iPad every day. It’s a family device.”

Ruckus Reader tracks kids’ in-app reading skills — the apps support up to 4 accounts, so parents can track more than one child on the same title — and reports back to parents with a weekly “Reader Meter” e-mail that ranks children’s mastery of “phonics and word recognition, print awareness, fluency, alphabetic knowledge, sequencing and story comprehension in real time.” The rankings are weighed against the national Common Core State Standards. “We are trying to make sense of all the options available to children in a digital age and strive to understand when screen time is delivering real educational value,” Richter said in a statement.

Through a partnership with School Library Journal, each parent e-mail includes a list of recommended print books for their child’s reading level.