Kids Zone has stopped airing new episodes of One Punch Man

Very long and rambling post ahead of my opinion on this:

This is a terrible and very shortsighted decision. This will not stop the piracy of OPM Urdu dub. If Netflix shows can be pirated, why does KZ think their shows will not be?

Of course it is admirable to take a hard stance against pirated content, and I understand why they are doing it, but they need to be practical.

Releasing an OTT service, even if its paid, will *not* bring their shows to the masses like their TV broadcast. Pakistan is a poor country. That's the truth. And you have to realise your audience.

Your audience is not a middle class who can afford a monthly fee to watch 2 anime dubs. Your audience is a population of children who are either too poor or don't have enough influence on their parents to pay for a service.

The first downfall is the schedule: it only airs twice a week. This normally wouldn't be a huge problem, but when you only air *SEVEN* other programmes that repeat on a pattern with zero variations, having something new is eye-catching, and the least KZ could do is air OPM every midnight, or extremely early morning.

KZ makes quality dubs and has fantastic presentation. They're a fantastic company that are very open with their processes.

But they also operate with some strange philosophies. They are adamant that not having a published schedule and not advertising times for their programmes is a good thing. It's not.

They are so stringent with their anti-piracy policy that they would rather stop 90% of their legal audience from watching the TV broadcast, and as a consequence, turn off viewers who were interested in One Punch Man by repeating 4 episodes endlessly, just to punish a tiny percent of people who are pirate viewers.

I repeat: you cannot stop the pirates, but the least you can do is offer a service that beats them.

I am currently not living in Pakistan. Unfortunately, I have to work on both days that OPM airs. It would be so easy for me to watch a pirated version at a more convenient time for me. However, I respect that KZ made the effort to have a livestream, and I have watched their livestream a LOT just because of it, and haven't watched a pirate copy. If anything, it would take me more effort to find a pirate copy.

KZ are already halfway there! Whenever their OTT service launched, they would definitely get an even bigger number of people watching it.

However, it *will not* succeed if they push it so fast. They need to have a broad catalogue, currently they have a lot of content, but 99% of it is for the 5-9 age group. The biggest draws are Ladybug, Winx Club and OPM.

They will soon have HxH but that will be at least 2 months away.

You cannot launch and sustain a service with only 4 shows that are major draws. They need to dub a good amount of anime or action Cartoons that will give people a reason to stick around and pay for longer than a month. They want to charge Crunchyroll level prices with 10% of the content.

It IS a good idea, but for the future, not for now. Especially when they've made the vast majority of their catalogue available on youtube. People in Pakistan will never pay in the numbers necessary for content that they can find on youtube.

Tl;dr Kids Zone are letting their success and hard work get to their head and I am very afraid that they will collapse and fail.

Insha'Allah it doesn't happen as I really want them to dub so many more shows. But they are acting extremely silly. We congratulate them all the time for what they do, because they are excellent at it. But they need to be able to take the criticism too. Hopefully they cool down and improve.

I also didn't want to be too harsh but I'm getting really frustrated with their attitude. I have 2 major problems with their schedule, 1) that they refuse to publish one, 2) that they have such a terrible schedule in the first place haha

Matlab wo apne aap ko samajhte kya hai??

Itne ache dubs, promo, presentation kar ke, matlab sara mushkil kaam karne ke baad, uss sab par pani pherte hain by not telling viewers the timings.

KZ view: if we tell the schedule, we will only get ratings for our popular shows like Ladybug, Zak storm etc. If we don't tell the schedule, everyone will watch all the time and our ratings will stay the same for every show.

Asliyat: older children who have tuition and students end up missing out on the shows they really want to watch kyun ke jab be tv on karte hai, ya Jungle book hota hai ya Robin hood. So they end up just not watching, and kids zones audience stays 5-9 year olds Jo haar cheez dekhte hai. Har programme par same ratings after hain, lekin they miss out on the ratings boost that their best shows get, because bache ko times nahi pata hai!!

Showing one episode once a week isn't a problem. All of our channels show their dramas in this way, only recently has maybe Geo gone to daily airings (and their quality has gone super downhill because of it). Everyone knows kis time news bulletins aate hain, kis time naya dramay ke kist aate hain and they can plan around this. Now, drama episodes are available on YouTube 1 or 2 days after airing.

THIS is how you do it if you want to show one episode a week. Thoray se repeats dekha lo, aur 1-2 din ke baad apne website par episode lao. Obviously, this strategy is working considering how popular our dramas are getting these days. A lot of people will watch the telecast, and if they're busy at that time, they can watch it later after a day.

Let's put this into perspective: KZ only show TWO new episodes every week. 1 of Ladybug S4, 1 of OPM, and both of them have only one repeat.

How is your audience supposed to know that the Monday to Friday Ladybug is old episodes, and ONE time on Saturday and Sunday are new ones?? Kamaz kam, weekend par, replace all of your old miraculous ladybug listing with that weeks new s4 episode. Or at least 2 or 3 times.

The reality is, jab Abu ghar aate hain, he wants to watch the news. After maghrib time, ammi wants to see her dramas. Children only have 2 hours in the morning before school,2 in the afternoon, between school finishing and madrasa/tuition, and maybe 1 or 2 hours at night, if they have more than 1 tv in their house.

You cannot totally treat your channel like western ones, you have to know your audience, and capture them at their best moments. I said previously: there's nothing wrong with a repeating schedule, everyone does it. But oh my GOD!

Kids Zone ka schedule kuch bohat hi repeat karta hai. It doesn't take into account timings AT all. Unho ne aik 5 ghantay ka block bana kar, baar baar repeat karte hain.

Obviously, they do understand their audience, because s4 Ladybug episodes come at 9am and 2pm on a Saturday, which is a pretty decent time. Lekin phir Sunday par kyun nahi repeat karte hain? That's the only day off for majority of school kids in this country and they don't take advantage of Sunday or Friday at all.

Mere bachpan mein (2005-2014), sab se best channel Cartoon Network tha. And I'm not saying this because it had amazing dubs. Actually, the dubs were all Hindi dubs and not always good quality, and sometimes they would just show English feed. I'm saying this because they genuinely had a great system. They don't use it anymore and that's why they're not as popular as they used to be.

Meri yaadash itni achi nahi hai but I'll try to remember the average schedule for 2008/09, which I think was probably the best time for the channel.

Sab se pehli baat, every weekend they had their Popcorn block. This is something that still happens today, and every weekend I knew that I could watch a cool film on CN. Its regular, and it has a fitting name. You remember it, and the timings (something like 11-12 in the morning) and you can prepare. It's a once a week event.

Now let's start from the beginning of the week:

Monday to Thursday, from like maybe 6am to 2pm, you had nursery and easy comedy shows like Tom and Jerry, looney tunes, courage, Johnny Bravo, something that the whole family can watch before school, and that the babies or toddlers can watch during the day when they're home alone. In between, you would have episodes of Naruto at like 8 am just before school, or Powerpuff girls, or Eon Kid and Kids Next Door at maybe 1pm, when some children come home for lunch or the end of the first school session. It was a good mix of action Cartoons and comedy.

Then there was the cookie jar block in the early afternoon. This one had more action Cartoons like digimon, or mix masters which I really remember fondly. It would be between 3 and 5 pm, so very suitable for young children who are home from school but maybe don't have tuition yet.

From 5pm to 7 pm was the best block which everyone still talks about today: Toonami

Dragon ball, Bakugan, Ben 10, Blue Dragon, Beyblade, Capeta, ultimate Muscle, there are so many shows. I don't even need to list them, because everyone knows Toonami. It comes at the perfect time, all the older kids are home, and they can watch the BEST shows.

I remember that the late evening block was called Candy land, which again, Kids Zone uses sponsors, but can use them better! Everyone knows candyland sweets but I always remember the name even more because of the CN block, and its been more than 10 years since. Anyway, after toonami, they used to show a lot of Ben 10. This was maybe from 7-8pm.

Now look, see how CN put its best shows in that short time slot? Just before the news? 5 pm to 8pm?

What does KZ Show every day from 5pm to 8pm? Double Bill of Robin Hood, Max Steel, Peter Pan, Zak Storm, Ladybug and Jungle book.

None of these are new episodes!

Every single day, at the time when your audience is at its peak, this is all you have to show!?

Anyway, the last blocks after 8/9 pm was my favourite, POGO. Before it became just a dumb Indian, chota Bheem channel, POGO was really cool. They had MAD, Sazer X, some other less known anime as well. I felt cooler watching POGO than with Toonami. I think POGO ran until 11pm or midnight. And later on in the block it would show Mr Bean, so again, a nice programmer towards the end of the day for the whole family.

By having a Block Schedule, you can essentially have lots of "mini" channels using just your 1 channel. CN in 2009 could be something suitable for the whole family as it always had age appropriate content for the different times of day.

This has already gone on way too long, but i do want to post separately about what I think a good schedule of theirs could look like.