 Aduham mai, everon. I know I'm in between you and afternoon tea and everything that could have gone wrong then went wrong. Tina koutou katoa ko Amy Mills to Kuwingua, Ngapoane Kiahu. I am the Head of Funding at New Zealand On Air. I've been in the role only four months now, but can speak with a bit of authority on this project and topic area in particular and it's a project very dear to my heart and about three years in the making partnership between New Zealand on Air and TVNZ, and at the time that the project was pitched I was actually on the other side. I was at TVNZ as the Digital and Children's Commissioner. So I wanted to sense check first who do a snapshot of who is actually aware of Heihei in the room. Okay awesome, heaps of you, great. I'm going to play you a little ident of the egies characters and then go into the guts of what I'm going to chat to you about briefly. So actually gimme this a sec. Can you still hear me alright with just the one? Is that all good? Cool. So what I wanted to chat to you about, I was going to try and truncate about 3 years into about 10 or 15 minutes. And I really wanted to talk you through what the problem was that we were both trying to solve, primarily NZ on Air but TVNZ was also in the game. Talk you through a bit of how we got there because I think it was a really complicated, interesting, difficult to deliver project and there was some key learnings from that. And also one of the core reasons that wanted to come and speak to you all today as well is that Heihei's got hopefully a really long shelf life in the lives of kiwi kids. And the intention is that we find more and more partnerships to get Heihei out into as many places and homes as possible for kids aged 5 to 9. So really keen off the back of this if anyone's in this space trying to reach other parents of that age group of kids or those kids directly would really love to have more conversations with people. And just briefly, hoping most of you know the remit of NZ on Air but those who don't, it's a Crown entity and NZ on Air exists to fund public media content which could sound boring but it's actually wonderful and it spans everything from community and access radio and student radio to local music to web series to some of the big scripted or factual New Zealand shows you'll see on the big screen everything to the treasured radio in New Zealand funded through New Zealand on Air and everything that we do is around protecting, developing and fostering New Zealand identity. So this space around kids content was particularly dear to our hearts and the reality was that we were facing a little bit of a crisis point in terms of how kiwi kids could access their stories. So that was the problem that we were trying to solve is back in the day when you had your three major channels it was really easy to reach New Zealanders and kids in particular as the media landscape started to change as the broadcasters themselves became more commercial became harder for kids content to find a home on free to air television so we were seeing a trend where kids shows that we'd sort of grown up with that tell our stories, our accents, they were dwindling on free to air television and masses of children were going online and while there was rich and amazing content on the likes of YouTube and at the point at which New Zealand only did some research around this actually I don't think Netflix kids had even hit the market in 2015 but there was a sort of mass exodus of kids online and while there was fantastic content there was also a lot of not fantastic content there was a lot of issues around safety for kids and it was quite clear that NZONI knew that they had to be in the digital space and so that was quite an interesting thing because NZONI is not really too involved in trying to fund platforms because of the complexity of them the ongoing cost, the money goes towards funding the content but in this instance there was a lack from the market of actually delivering a space for kids and the other really interesting, so there was a whole tranche of research done with Colmar Brunton in 2015 and it was also really clear from the parents that they were saying we want our kids to hear our stories, it matters enormously they need to see themselves reflected back at them and so that's where NZONI was like right there's a role here to play and it's going to have to probably be a digital one because this is the space and this is where these children are so what could an online home for local children's content look like and who would we work with to deliver it and so there was quite a long process which I wasn't involved in because I was on the other side at the TVNZ end at that time but there was a discussion paper that went out stakeholders were asked to submit responses to that feedback was collated and then articulated back and a draft paper went out and then a call-out or a request for proposals went out to the market and that's where TVNZ came in the mix and you're going to have to ignore all this stuff because I think this is the old keynote formatting and where there were some sort of deal breakers were things like had to be no advertising on the platform given this group of children had to be free access, that's NZONI's remit so all New Zealanders have to be able to access the content the public funding is going towards had to be a joined up media sector because it felt like this is a space especially when it's non-commercial that wasn't going to be competitive so what could that look like co-investment always makes public money go further so that's a real key piece and at the centre of all of it one of my biggest learnings was you always have the child front and centre when you're trying to build a product for them especially at that primary school age and older can't be kind of led by the needs around education that has to be an underpinning in it but kids have to feel like it's buying for them so then TVNZ won the competitive pitch and there are a few reasons for that and a long legacy of TVNZ also delivering in the children's media space but also a really solid infrastructure that came with TVNZ around how this digital platform is going to be delivered and how that would be done which is a whole another probably hour long presentation and then once the project kicked off we worked really closely with stakeholders and actually there's some it's quite a powerful document that's up on our website around the child centre principles we did a charter basically around what this had to do and be for children and this kind of summarises where that space was that we knew how critical stories are for their development of imagination we knew how important it was for them to see themselves reflected back at them and that that would then in turn foster a sense of their own belonging in New Zealand and what that looked like so that was a sort of underpinning we then went out and did a bit further research because the Colmar Brunton Research had looked at children aged six to fourteen and so once the project kicked off we went and did a regroup and went back to those audiences to better understand them and this slide is essentially showing you why we ended up focusing on five to nine for hei hei in the end because to a degree and it sounds cynical to say it but it felt like we'd lost ten plus that their kind of autonomy and agency they were deciding what they wanted to watch the parents, the caregivers they had a lesser degree of involvement around what the kids were watching and so we felt like in order to get the best bang for back in order to launch a platform in an online home for kids content we probably had to focus in that five to nine age range at the beginning and the other interesting thing that came out of the research was the split down the middle of parents behaviour or most of media comfortable and then media wary parents and the media comfortable parents were I want my kids to have as much content as possible that they can devour there's a lot of babysitting going on with the devices there was a little bit of cultural cringe factor you know like I don't think New Zealand content is actually that great and not all that into it my kids want kind of glossy international stuff whereas the media wary parents were I really care if my kids are getting local content I care if the platform safe is it safe and so we knew that when we launched the platform that those were the parents we were going to be talking to but we also needed to make sure we were appealing to the other side which is why you'll see on hey hey there's a mix of international titles as well as local but it's about 85% local and then for us it was incredibly important as well to reflect our biculturalism to kind of work with the amazing Stacey Morrison and her husband Scotty to develop a content po content framework that then went out to the production community so all the amazing creators and storytellers and again it's quite a dense tech slide but this is all up on our website under the hey hey section but it said to the production community this is the content that needs to reach our children and this is why and so when we have our funding rounds as NZ on air we want to see content coming in for hey hey that ladders out of all this thinking so we were trying to be really clear with the makers and creators what we needed from them and then this was the promise and this was pinned up on all our walls and it dictated everything that we did really it was saying the platform's going to have to tell engaging high quality local stories and it has to be good for children it has to feel positive and impact their lives in a good way and of course it has to be digital so tech, games how we worked with that was all about trying to inspire kids imaginations and then NZ on air had in 2017 the first funding round for children knowing that hey hey was going to be a platform and invested around $10 million in kids content and this is a snapshot of the we've just gone through this second year's round but this was a snapshot of the work we were trying to do to look at what's the spread across that age range how do we deliver to both how do we deliver to an interactive offering on this platform and then how do we get a spread of genres and formats of content so live action, animation, comedy so that sort of gives you an idea of what we were juggling and then this is the hero teaser campaign that TVNZ's marketing team made to launch the platform in late May and local shows like zoom move and Kai 5 ooo thanks barefoot bandits ooo can i love some sure catch and my the brave plus some of the best shows from around the world music, stories, competitions and games watch and play on hey hey I love those egies so it's a website interface looks very similar to Netflix and that was a big learning for us when we were doing all of the intricate kind of user journey wireframe mapping was keep it simple and kids are so used to this interface now that actually it did the job of familiarising themselves and it almost did that thing of like oh it feels the same as that type of product so I get it and it's for me and it's not trying to be anything different and the minute we tried to go anywhere more interactive we realised it aged it really distinctly so you couldn't deliver to sort of five year olds would also appreciate it so it had to be that the interface remained really simple and then the content could speak for itself and feel personalised for the age range of kids and it's also a smartphone app and it's a tablet app for iOS and Android and we're hoping to launch Chromecast this month or no December so that's on the way as well and there's four well three core content categories which are the videos of very differing generations which you'll see games and games comes in the form of embedded web games in the platform but also links out to the app store where native New Zealand game apps can live so there's a parental gate lock that will pop up so that if kids are younger they won't dive into the app store but the older kids who in theory would be allowed access can get through and then there's a sound audio stories section that also has music in it and on the website there's competitions as well and this is actually the first time I think we have been able to present and have some results to share as well which is quite exciting so it launched in late May I think it was the last week of May it launched so it's been around for nine on six months almost seven months and when we were mapping what targets looked like it was really difficult because there wasn't really anything to benchmark it within the space in New Zealand for this audience group so we looked at the scope of where we could go and there's about 50,000 homes in New Zealand with kids five to nine so as a team we sort of looked at that and said right conservatively if we can hit 10% of that in terms of unique users in the first year of launch we're probably doing okay and we can build from that base so we were looking for 25,000 unique users so that included downloads and then unique visits to the website and we've smashed that target so conservatively we've had 70,000 app downloads the different endpoints so they're arguably unique there'll be a little bit of crossover where you might have households where you've got people visiting the website and downloading the apps but we've still managed to well out do our target and you've got 95,000 unique web users we've hit over three quarters of a million video views since launch and sessions are climbing as well which has just really been this wonderful kind of sense of relief of like the audience is there, the product still needs to be enhanced and developed but it's definitely found its target audience and then the other thing that we were very clear on was we're never going to out Netflix, Netflix or out YouTube, YouTube but if we could be driving weekly usage of the platform and the idea being weekend usage and ideally co-family viewing experiences then that was the space we felt we could meaningfully play in with the volume of content that we could feasibly generate and create so we're getting about 13,000 weekly users coming in who are coming in just over one and a half times a week the session duration is really healthy at 31 minutes so we're thinking games is driving a lot of that skews iOS and that tranche in the middle there you probably won't be able to read that but that pink line is tablet and so what it shows you on the left, web is blue and smartphone is orange at the top so it shows you more people are coming into the website we think some of that might have been driven around launch but you're actually getting sessions as the middle column and durations on the right hand side you're getting longer sessions on tablet and more sessions coming in regularly on tablet and I think we sort of knew that, that was the hunch that tablet was going to be the golden device that kids would love and it really is and then below here you've got just demonstrating that where the greens are is Saturday, Sunday so that's the highest visitation coming in throughout the week followed by Friday and Monday so it really is delivering on that weekend proposition that we'd hoped for and the other thing that was a real relief to us was that it's spread across the region so while you're getting higher numbers of users in the main urban centres Wellington, Christchurch, Auckland because of the population side in terms of per population, sort of per capita you're actually seeing higher usage in places like Whangarei and Tauranga which is really, that was another piece that was really important to us, it couldn't just feel like it was city centre usage, we wanted it to get out across the regions and just because it was such a long process and there was so much to share I've just distilled it down into a couple of things but really important for us was local content is king, that realisation and on the left there we've got the top ten shows on the platform and the seven in blue are all local, used to be the top five but Peppa Pig nudged up in the last quarter I was really gutted but I think that was something that we had we weren't sure that was going to be the case and there's a lot of content on there like transformers and things and we thought that might outdo the local stuff and it absolutely hasn't Fanimals being one of the biggest drivers of traffic on the site and we can absolutely put hand on heart and say that's because Fanimals is a television property as well as a digital property so it's on weekdays, on TVNZ2 for kids in the afternoon and every episode pushes to hey hey so we're seeing phenomenal traffic driving from TV to digital which again was a big learning for us we weren't sure that was going to be the case and does demonstrate still even though it's in decline how powerful television is in terms of how much it reaches out across New Zealand and this very grainy photograph that was sent to me by my old boss at TVNZ of hey hey being discovered by her kids for the first time all clustered around the device and I just love that photo and it demonstrated to us that need which we had been doing throughout the sort of two years of project build was put the kids first and foremost you're always having to make massive compromises when you're launching a digital platform but every decision we made that felt like a really critical one how do we have the videos playing how does this work we made sure that we were going to kids first and foremost to sense check what their experience of that was and what they needed and it seems so obvious to say I actually heard in the last presentation before I was coming in I think was someone saying exactly this around the difficulties of projects and how critical it is for communication to be effective and transparent and what I thought was to demonstrate the layers of governance and oversight so the project team build that was blood sweat and tears to get it done but all the way up to the top we had an oversight team so when we had to make big calls about how things might work or if we had to nix something we had a really top tier level with an external chair who was sense checking that and then they knew what we were trying to let it towards so they had that ability to look down and say are we going to compromise anything that we've said here as a fundamental from the outset of the project and then when it came to things like the content curation and the approach towards content it felt really important to be working with the wider industry and the children's screen trust in particular so there was a lot of layers there and things like Slack became completely critical to getting anything done and there was a lot of communication probably over communication and just because I know you'll be hungry this was just the last slide to say there's a couple of idents of the egis quickly but this was just to say that we worked with some wonderful partners throughout people like Maori Television we've actually worked to have a whole stream of their children's content sitting within Heihei we're hoping to do something similar with RNZ around what their children's content offering is and then the likes of Health Promotion Agency were actually working with us to sort of do matched funding of content that delivered to the needs of HPA so there's a show Kai 5 on the Heihei platform all about teaching kids how to cook and eat well and that lad is out of the core goals that the HPA had at the time so they could come in and say we would like to contribute towards that content being made and Auckland Library in Early Talks because they're about to put an enormous screen up in Aotea Square, it might already be up and want to do some dedicated Heihei curation and channel promotion through that platform so we're really keen to find partners and I think the next step in growth for Heihei will be how we work with other partners to get it out into the world and how our platform can be used by others to reach that audience so I'll just end on two little idents for you at Beegies this is my favourite