Hasbro to Buy Peppa Pig Owner for $4B | Hacker News Reader

Hasbro to Buy Peppa Pig Owner for $4B

bbc.com

58 pointshhs29 comments

Judging by the comments in this thread & the way the media is writing headlines this makes it sound like Hasbro is buying Peppa / a one-off cartoon studio for $4b

When in fact what Hasbro is actually buying is Entertainment One (EO) which is a massive media conglomerate . (1)

EO acquires stakes and licensing rights in dozens of properties, including the studio behind Peppa that they paid ~$210m for in 2015 (2)

For Hasbro this acquisition lines them up with a licensing rich catalog to push out their wares and open new worldwide markets.

Beyond that EO is a:

- 50 year old company - Generates >$1b in revenue / annually - Thousands of employees - Hundreds of entertainment properties with more than 80,000 hours of film and television content and approximately 40,000 music tracks. - Mini-disney model of robust acquisition and then licensing / merchandising

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entertainment_One (1)

https://www.crunchbase.com/acquisition/entertainment-one-acq... (2)

I found Peppa Pig a great resource to start grasping a new language.

The dialogs are repetitive enough to be gentle practice for recognizing words through speech, and the characters' struggles in learning new concepts also lead to some helpful descriptions that can supplant a dictionary.

That's really interesting. I've always shied away from dubbed sources under some vague "it doesn't follow the distribution of the target language because it is translated", which feels kinda stupid, typing it out.

But Peppa big is probably watched by as many children in my target language as any native programming, so in a sense it is as native as anything else.

As the parent of a kid in the target audience, Peppa pig represents one of the most popular youtube channels.

I have to wonder realistically how long a character/canon has traction in order to pay back a $4 billion investment.

Something like Mickey Mouse is probably past the end of its lifetime now, but Star Wars franchising is going strong and was probably a good buy for Disney. Things like He-Man were barely blips.

> Something like Mickey Mouse is probably past the end of its lifetime now

Is that true? I only know a few toddlers but they love Mickey

Yep, my 2-year old too, despite my vigilant efforts throwing every Disney toy/gift/book he or his brothers received directly into the trash before exposing them to it... they absorb it from their adjacent kids via something like osmosis.

    (T_T)

The company's a lot more than just Peppa Pig, though.

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2016/may/24/peppa-pig-on-t...

> The character is owned by Entertainment One, which makes and distributes TV and films including Grey’s Anatomy, Spotlight and The Hunger Games. The company said Peppa pulled in more than $1.1bn in retail sales, adding that it struck 500 new or renewed deals with TV and product licensing partners in the year to the end of March.

Mickey Mouse is anything but past the end of its lifetime. He and his associated characters are refreshed often. Mickey and the Roadster Racers is a relatively new show and quite popular with my own child and those of our friends, and we're far from the over the top "Disney people".

Mickey Mouse will be public domain in 5 years from now.

Assuming Congress doesn’t extend copyright terms...which they repeatedly have throughout the course of history.

Thanks to Disney and Sonny.

> Something like Mickey Mouse is probably past the end

Anecdotally, that's not true in my house. My daughter loves Mickey Mouse Clubhouse.

My daugther loves to watch it, too. But what a terrible series that is. The characters resolve every problem they run into by calling this magic gizmo that resembles ... a slot machine? What's that about? I try to avoid it now and offer other options.

There are many episodes and the target audience continually renews as they land in the age range for the show. Plenty Hasbro can do to improve product lines I guess, but there's also the opportunity for more theme parks, there's only one in the UK (quite wonderful, full of toddlers mobbing the main characters).

They'll pay it off just by selling toys and t-shirts... and realistically it's one of the better cartoons for toddlers, fun, smart, non-violent...

The acquisition is of Entertainment One a huge company with a portfolio of properties and content. They make $1 billion per year.

Disney is in the process of setting fire to the Star Wars brand's value. Their new SW theme park was a colossal flop by Disney park standards, and after the boondoggle that was The Last Jedi, Solo failed to make anywhere near its projected numbers.

The Last Jedi made over a billion dollars worldwide... less than prior films but still hardly a "boondoggle."

And a lot of those filmgoers eager to see it, left the theater disappointed in the story and soured on the brand, which contributed to the franchise fatigue Solo suffered at the box office from.

The Last Jedi was divisive, but plenty of people liked it as well.

Solo was a film that no one was really asking for, and that also failed on its own merits.

Is Mickey in the public domain now? Can other companies start using him and the other early Disney characters in new content?

As an aside, people are awfully enamored with "Star Wars" and other big tent pole series. However, if the costs of writing and filmmaking were low or non-existent, I believe the market would be flooded with new creativity. There would be tons of new stories in the sci-fi and fantasy genres, and the value of any single brand or series would plummet.

All of that to say, I don't feel like people are necessarily attached to "brands" or "licenses" like "Mickey" or "Star Wars", it's just that there aren't enough choices available. It's too expensive to create new entries. Copyright enshrines these brands, companies seldom want to invest in creating new ones, and the barriers to entry make it hard for competition to arise. Experiments are risky.

Imagine a world with substantially lower cost to produce. In the limit, there would be so many stories that we'd be hearing about new experiences in content from our friends on a daily basis. We couldn't explore the entire graph. Discovery would be ephemeral and happenstance, and very few things would ever rise to the cultural prominence of Marvel, simply because there would be worthwhile novelty everywhere you look.

Imagine when our computers can dream up stories to tell us. That excites me.

This 1-minute clip is usually good for a chuckle: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jil0WCh_UoQ

Hopefully that's not too off-topic. Maybe not everyone knows peppa pig.

Peppa is also the subject of a weird tiktok meme at the moment (or maybe the moment's passed already ... I don't know, I'm old and lame :P ) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B0uxRav86NI

Peppa Pig was all over China this year for Year of the Pig merchandise.

I think what's amazing about the Peppa Pig franchise is how it appeals to both sexes and even parents. The only thing lacking before was the toy line.

It's amazing to learn that something I've never heard of is worth $4 billion.

Take a guess at the number of cities in the world with over one million people. See how many there are, and how many of them you knew existed. Think of how many countries have companies worth 4B. The world is a big place.

Ok, there are probably a few more stipulations about this particular thing that make this surprising such as being on youtube which I visit quite frequently.

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