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The most popular YouTube videos for kids appear to be coming to Netflix Inc.
“Cocomelon: Season 1” will start airing on Netflix’s NFLX, -0.74% streaming service on June 1, according to a listing for upcoming releases on the service that was released Wednesday. The series is listed alongside content that Netflix licenses from other sources, as opposed to original content developed by Netflix.
Netflix did not respond to a request for more information Wednesday afternoon, and Cocomelon’s tight-lipped creator, Treasure Studio Inc., did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
Roku Inc. ROKU, +0.87% announced Tuesday that a Cocomelon channel debuted on its service, suggesting that Treasure Studio is moving Cocomelon beyond Alphabet Inc.’s GOOGL, +2.52% GOOG, +2.42% YouTube, where it originally became famous for animated videos with catchy songs for preschoolers. As of Wednesday afternoon, the channel had 84.2 million YouTube subscribers and its videos had accumulated more than 62.3 billion views combined on that platform.
Only two independent YouTube channels have more subscribers, according to SocialBlade, and both are from outside the U.S. — Indian music site T-Series and videogame streamer PewDiePie both have more than 100 million subscribers. Cocomelon is ranked second by video views overall to T-Series, according to SocialBlade.
Just last week, Cocomelon became the first YouTube channel ever to surpass 1 billion views in a week, according to TubeFilter.
Roku’s news release announcing the new Cocomelon channel on its service included a statement from Jay Jeon, the creator and founder of Treasure Studio. Jeon is famously secretive, and was only identified as the person behind Treasure Studio in a Bloomberg News article earlier this year, 14 years after he and his wife began posting videos to YouTube, which had not yet been acquired by Google when the channel launched.
“At Cocomelon, we’re driven by being able to engage families with entertaining and educational content that makes universally relatable preschool moments fun,” Jeon said, later adding, “This partnership is an important component of our strategy to be everywhere our audience is today.”
MarketWatch staff writers Jonathan Swartz and Mike Murphy contributed to this article.
