Disney to target boys with rebranded cable channel, Disney XD

I miss the Ink & Paint Club on the Disney Channel...:(

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Originally Posted by silverarrow

While I love the idea of some shows geared towards boys, why put these on a whole different channel? Why not take these new shows they plan on making and put them on the regular Disney Channel in place of the gazillion reruns of other shows they tend to have. While I do enjoy watching some of the Disney shows, they tend to be on all the time. Shows are on so often, I have no idea when the new episodes are on. Instead of separating the girls and the boys, why not add more content to Disney Channel. Advertise these new boy shows on other channels and maybe they'll get their desired audience to start watching Disney. If they want a larger male audience, making a channel just for them that you have to order extra seems dumb. As much as "Aaron Stone" sounds interesting, I'm not going to pay extra just to get that one channel.

I would have to agree though, that the Disney Channel of today seems geared more towards girls. Heck, I'm a girl and some of the shows bug me. I'd much rather watch a few shows of the boys Disney Channel (not enough to buy the channel though)

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Welcome to the world of nearly a 1,000 cable channels. Back in the 70's my home town only had 4 channels abc, nbc, cbs, pbs, back it up a couple decades, into the 50's and Disney was lucky to even have a single show on tv. But the whole expansion of cable is due to "segregation of audiences". CNN - all news, and MTV (at the time) all music, HBO and Showtime - all movies were among the first. Then come ESPN, Nick, Comedy Central, SciFi, Animal planet, Cooking, ect. These days the channels have further segregated. And my cable system has nearly 50 Music ONLY stations, Encore has several different movie channel divided to Western, Dramas, love, mystery, and action, then there is Lifetime for women, Spike for men, Audiences are more segregated and divided than ever before. And boys and girls generally have different likes, although those are varied, too. So it only makes sense to appeal to those needs as well. And some shows will crossover and have appeal and that's ok, but if you don't keep attracting certain parts of your market, some other station will be readdy to take that audience from you.

As for why have so many channels with so many repeats, well, those shows must still have some appeal, but look at TVLand, a station that was built on the idea of airing nothing but reruns. And with a new generation always coming up, these old shows are always new to someone younger than the last time they aired. Some shows are timeless, but some only hold good for X number of years, but it still means that the inventory of older shows continues to build just as rapidly as new shows pop up.

I will be very surprized if Disney can create something for this target audience. I don't think they have the people power to write for boys. They will need to hire some new people and fire their sensors. This is the company that gave us pirates chasing food. If they use their current set of writers we will end up with belching and farting cartoons set to music.

It will flop. The reason Disney channel has succeeded with the 8-14 year old girl demo, is because their aren't that many channels geared toward them (no matter how good or god awful they are). Everything thing else on TV is already geared towards boys, to try to pull them away with a low rated hardly carried station, and compete with Nick will be an uphill battle.

I find it highly unlikely that Disney can compete with Nick in the boy demo. Mostly because of content reasons. As has been mentioned before by others, Disney sensors their show at about two times the strictness that Nick does and unless they bust out some serious quality acting, directing and storytelling for this channel the borderline lascivious and violent content of Nick is going to trounce anything Disney brings to the table. If they do have that kind of quality programing then I wish they'd put it on the regular Disney channel instead of that puerile trash they have now. Parents may like the content of Disney shows better but probably not enough to deny their kids the shows that everyone else is watching or to order an entire separate channel.

I just want vault Disney back... just a few hours at night when I could watch all those amazing old Disney films.... ::sigh:: Maybe even just once a week would be enough... just something!