It’s mid-March, which means everybody has gone bracket-mad, and you can’t throw a rock without hitting a website that’s running some sort of nutty WHO IS THE GREATEST OF ALL TIME face-off series. Not that I’m complaining, necessarily — pop culture cage matches are fun, and anyway, we’re going to get in on the action by helping out with this year’s KidVid Tournament. And sometimes these things are good for discussion, too. Case in point: The Hunt for America’s Finest Cable Channel, currently going on over at TV.com.
Over the weekend, the tournament arrived at the kiddie part of the dial and asked readers the all-important question: What’s the Best Children’s Network? Of course, this being one small part of a much larger contest, you only have two channels to choose from: Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel. Which made me wonder — how many of us are really choosing between those channels on a regular basis?
I wonder not only because there are plenty of other options to choose from on the TV dial, but we have a lot of other choices in general — Netflix, Apple, and Amazon will give you whatever you’re in the mood for by the byte, and if you use those options in conjunction with programming stored on your DVR, then you may not even be aware which channels are responsible for your children’s favorite shows. Put another way: we sort of create our own channels at this point, don’t we?
This isn’t an indictment of TV.com’s tournament, just an observation and a way of asking you for your thoughts. Do you have a Nick vs. Disney preference, or are you digitally sampling from the PBS/Hub/CN/Nick/Disney/whatever buffet?
