KI.KA

This article is about the German children's channel. For the Dutch foundation for children's cancer, see Foundation KiKa. For the 1993 Pedro Almodóvar film, see Kika.

KI.KA
Launched	January 1, 1997
Owned by	ARD (BR HR MDR NDR Radio Bremen RBB Saarländischer Rundfunk SWR WDR) and ZDF
Language	German
Headquarters	Erfurt, Germany
Website	KI.KA

KI.KA ("Der Kinderkanal" = "The Children's Channel") is a public non-commercial free television channel based in Erfurt, Germany. It is a joint venture of national public television channels ARD, and ARD's constituent broadcasting institutions – BR, HR, MDR, NDR, Radio Bremen, RBB, Saarländischer Rundfunk, SWR, WDR and ZDF, and is targeted at children and youth. KI.KA is broadcast on analog cable and satellite as well as digital services, DVB-T, cable and via Astra. KI.KA operates daily from 6:00 a.m. CET until 9:00 p.m. CET, and airs a mixture of live action and animated features. Until 2003, its analog cable and satellite service ended at 7:00 p.m. CET; after that time the frequency was used by Arte. KI.KA now has exclusive use of its frequency — Arte was assigned its own in 2003.

The station uses live continuity announcers, two of the most popular being Juri Tetzlaff (1997–2010), Karsten Blumenthal (1997–2004), Singa Gätgens (1997–2010), Lukas Koch (2003-3/2009). The station also repeats shows such as Tabaluga TiVi from ZDF's main service.

The station generally serves children ranging from the age of 3 to approximately 13. Its mascot is the puppet character Bernd das Brot, a chronically depressive loaf of bread.^[1] The girlgroup Saphir was formed of the 2007-10 winners of the talent show KI.KA LIVE - Beste Stimme gesucht! (Best voice wanted).

Recent developments within the last years

There have been some clear perceptible changes in the programme for several years now. Although it had been one of the channel’s aims right from the start to broadcast both non-animated series and animated ones, the latter predominates the channel’s programme (85%) by now. There are sometimes continuous rebroadcasts of most of the series, which have come to an end. Similar to the procedure of private commercial stations, series are broadcast as double features. The difference between the working day and weekend programme keeps vanishing steadily, since many series are put on the air on a daily basis. Thus, some series such as “Hier ist Ian”, “Pet Alien” or “Au Schwarte!” are almost constantly part of the programme. The “Augsburger Puppenkiste”, which is a rather old German television programme and which had always been on the air on Saturday and Sunday mornings, was taken out of the KI.KA programme for four years, but returned in April 2008. Even so, most of the older series, which have been repeatedly broadcast between 1997 and 2004, have been excluded from the channel’s programme by now. The fact that ARD and ZDF do not possess appropriate broadcasting rights any longer partly accounts for the latter condition. Nevertheless, especially older series (for example "Pippi Langstrumpf", "Es war einmal...", "Pan Tau") can only be seen on the ZDF and regional channels in spite of existing broadcast rights. Apart from numerous animated series, the afternoon soap “Schloss Einstein” is currently almost the only fictional non-animated series within the channel’s programme during the day. There are only two other non-animated series of which one is on the air in the afternoon and the other in the evening. There are still two children’s movies (on Fridays and Sundays) on KI.KA, although, even at that time, animated films are being broadcast more often.

See also

• List of German language television channels

References

1. ^ Deutsche Welle staff (10 August 2004). "Give Us Our Daily Bernd". dw-world.de (Deutsche Welle). http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,,1145310,00.html. Retrieved 25 March 2009. 

External links

• Official Site (German)
• Tabaluga TiVi Home Page (German)