SPORTS MEDIA | KIDS CONTENT DISTRIBUTION
MLB Clubhouse lands on the free kids streaming service HappyKids, a second outlet five months after the YouTube Kids launch; viewing among ages 2-11 on national broadcasts is up 23%
The mascot compilation 'Goofy Mascot Dances, Hugs and Antics!' on the MLB Clubhouse YouTube channel. The channel had 10,100 subscribers as of Sept. 17. Photo: MLB Clubhouse/YouTube (screen capture)
Major League Baseball (MLB) is supplying MLB Clubhouse, its children's content channel, to HappyKids, the ad-supported kids streaming service run by Future Today. Future Today announced the deal on Sept. 15. MLB Clubhouse opened on YouTube Kids on April 7, so the channel gets its first outlet outside YouTube five months after launch.
The programming going to HappyKids includes the stop-motion animated series The Doug Out!, the drawing show MLB Art Club made with Crayola, No Easy Outs, which follows players on their way to the majors, and the kids' highlights package Whacky Highlights.
David Di Lorenzo, senior vice president of content acquisitions and partnerships at Future Today, told Stream TV Insider in a Sept. 15 interview that the HappyKids lineup will match the MLB Clubhouse YouTube channel, though content from ABCmouse, the education app that partnered on the YouTube launch, is left out of this supply deal.
MLB's basis for opening a second outlet is its child-viewing data. The league says viewing among ages 2-11 across national broadcasts rose 23% year over year, and the median age of a ticket buyer has fallen from 51 in 2019 to 45. MLB's main YouTube channel generated 1.3 billion views in 2025, up 40%, and added close to 1 million subscribers; the league is using MLB Clubhouse to carry that growth into a younger age band.
HappyKids' basis for taking league content is family viewing. Future Today says 85% of viewing on HappyKids is family co-viewing and the service delivers more than 800 million monthly impressions, and at the IAB NewFronts in March it reported that HappyKids' audience had grown 45% year over year. The deal is HappyKids' first with a professional sports league, and the company says it will pursue other major leagues in the coming months.
Second outlet five months after the YouTube Kids launch; lineup matches YouTube and refreshes monthly
MLB Clubhouse content is available on the HappyKids website and on its connected-TV apps for Roku, Fire TV, Samsung TV Plus, Vizio and LG. Future Today's release says the content became available in August 2026, so the September announcement formalizes programming already on the service. Di Lorenzo said HappyKids already offers several hours of MLB Clubhouse programming and will add new episodes each month, without giving a title count.
Gregg Klayman, MLB's senior vice president of product development and content strategy, said in the release that "reaching young fans means meeting them on the platforms where they already spend their time with their families." He described the HappyKids deal as a way to put MLB Clubhouse "in front of families in a trusted, co-viewing environment, extending the reach of our content well beyond our own channels."
At the April launch, MLB opened the channel on YouTube Kids with ABCmouse and Crayola as partners. ABCmouse's 2025 collaboration with MLB had generated more than 11 million views, so the league brought proven education content along with the new channel. Crayola co-posts each episode of MLB Art Club on its own channel, and the first season runs 34 episodes, one per club plus four specials. The Doug Out! is MLB's first stop-motion series, created by Emmy-winning creator Adam Reid, and its first episode featured Seattle Mariners catcher Cal Raleigh.
About 10,000 subscribers; views range from under 1,000 to 1 million per video
The MLB Clubhouse YouTube channel had 10,100 subscribers on Sept. 17, five months after launch. Views vary widely by video: some clips have fewer than 1,000 views while one episode of The Doug Out! passed 1 million. A compilation of club mascots dancing and clowning, including the Minnesota Twins' TC Bear, is posted under the title "Baseball's Silliest Side," and the channel's editing leans on mascots, cheering and player personalities rather than game records. Stream TV Insider, which reported the count, cautioned readers on how YouTube tallies views.
Set against MLB's official channel, which drew 1.3 billion views in 2025 and added about 1 million subscribers, the kids channel is still small. YouTube Kids sits behind parental settings, which limits the recommendation-driven traffic the main YouTube app provides, and its ad rates run below those of general channels. That is why the league treats the kids channel as a reach vehicle rather than an ad-revenue line, and why it is extending that reach through a connected-TV app such as HappyKids.
HappyKids: 800 million monthly impressions, 85% family co-viewing, first league deal
Future Today, founded in 2006, runs the free movie and series service Fawesome, the kids service HappyKids and the cooking channel iFood.tv. At the IAB NewFronts on March 25, the company said Fawesome and HappyKids reach more than 75 million U.S. households, deliver more than 2 billion monthly ad impressions and drove 850 million hours of viewing in 2025. For HappyKids alone, audience growth was 45% and monthly impressions exceeded 800 million; the service programs by age band (0-4, 4-6, 6-9 and tweens) and runs a separate Family section for parents and children to watch together.
Future Today already carries live sports. Fawesome added live events through deals with the American 7s Football League and the Professional Grappling Federation, and signed more than 50 creator partnerships in 2025, including Jesser, a basketball YouTuber with close to 40 million subscribers (NewscastStudio, March 25). The MLB deal puts produced children's programming on the kids service instead of live games, and the company has made it the starting point of a wider sports push.
"Sports fandom starts young, and we want HappyKids to be the place where that fandom is born," Di Lorenzo said in the release. For advertisers, kids content combines brand safety with family co-viewing, so with MLB programming in place HappyKids can attach sports-category ad demand to its kids and family inventory.
Ages 2-11 up 23%, median ticket buyer down from 51 to 45: why MLB is funding kids content
Most of MLB's 2026 audience metrics have risen. National broadcast viewership was up 44% year over year as of early May, the best in close to a decade (Yahoo Sports, May 7), and through the first half of the season local TV for the 14 clubs under MLB's broadcast umbrella was up 4%, unique streamers up 24% and average minutes streamed up 43% (Forbes, July 13). TNT Sports averaged 466,000 viewers across the first half, up 21%, with viewing among women 2+ up 41%. NBC's first Sunday Night Baseball since returning drew 4 million viewers, its most in 15 years, and Netflix's Opening Night drew about 3 million.
Part of the increase comes from measurement. Nielsen's Big Data + Panel methodology, approved in January 2025, is reflected in this season's figures, and Yahoo Sports noted that it may have added to the size of the gains. The 23% rise among ages 2-11 comes from the same framework, and Stream TV Insider's reading is that viewing in that age band is most likely co-viewing with parents or families.
MLB's reason for putting budget into kids programming is to pull an already falling fan age further down into the 2-11 band. The league says the median age of a ticket buyer dropped from 51 in 2019 to 45, and the average age of an MLB.TV subscriber from 48 to 44. The pitch clock, introduced in 2023, cut average game time below 2 hours 40 minutes and lowered the entry barrier for younger viewers, and #MLB posts on TikTok rose almost 60% from 2024 to 2025, taking the league to about 11 million followers across its global accounts (Marketing Brew, March 26).
Kids content also has value because it can be delivered regardless of the game calendar. The current collective bargaining agreement expires in December 2026, and Yahoo Sports raised the possibility of a lockout followed by a strike and lost games in 2027. Animation and drawing shows keep running when games stop, which makes them one of the league's hedges.
MLB 2026 audience growth. The all-national figure is as of early May; the rest are first-half figures as of July. Source: MLB, Nielsen (Yahoo Sports, Forbes, Cord Cutters News)
MLB fan age. Source: MLB, via MNTN Research, July 24
264 sports FAST channels, games and events up 37.5%: sports arrives on free streaming
Gracenote, Nielsen's content data unit, said in its Q3 2026 Data Hub analysis released Aug. 20 that 264 FAST channels were classified as sports in July 2026, up 13.8% year over year, while unique sports program titles rose 31.2% and individual games and events rose 37.5%, so programming volume grew more than twice as fast as channel count. All FAST channels totaled 2,172, up 17.5%, and sports programming also appeared on 20 channels outside the sports category.
The content going onto FAST is also getting newer: the share produced in 2020 or later rose from 47% a year ago to 51.7%, and for sports programming from 51.6% to 72%. HappyKids' MLB lineup is on-demand (AVOD) rather than a linear FAST channel, but it sits in the same movement of league-made content into free ad-supported services.
FAST sports programming growth. Source: Gracenote (Nielsen) Q3 2026 Data Hub
FAST revenue from $6 billion in 2025 to $11 billion in 2030; 131.4 million U.S. users, and ad fill rates falling
Omdia forecast at Content London on Dec. 3, 2025 that global FAST revenue will grow from $6 billion (about KRW 8.2 trillion) in 2025 to $11 billion (KRW 15.1 trillion) in 2030. Premium ad-supported streaming ad revenue, combining hybrid SVOD/AVOD, native AVOD, FAST and broadcaster streaming, reached $42.1 billion (KRW 57.6 trillion) in 2025, up 15.6%, and ad revenue at the five largest U.S. subscription services (Netflix, Amazon, Disney, HBO Max and Paramount) is projected at $24.3 billion (KRW 33.3 trillion) in 2030, or 20% of their combined revenue, up from 13% in 2025. Omdia attributes FAST growth to investment by TV makers and platforms such as Roku Channel, Samsung TV Plus, LG Channels, Pluto TV and Fire TV Channels, together with demand for services that require no subscription.
The U.S. leads on user count. EMARKETER forecasts 131.4 million U.S. FAST users in 2026, 54% of connected-TV users and 5.8% more than in 2025. By platform, Roku Channel has 97.3 million viewers, Tubi 92.5 million and Pluto TV 68.6 million, and the three together accounted for 5.7% of all U.S. TV viewing in May 2025 (Gracenote). Comscore put FAST viewing at 1.8 billion hours in August 2025, up 43%, and Wurl's September 2025 report found monthly active FAST households up 12%, daily viewing hours per household up 16% and channel session duration up 25%.
Advertising is following viewing at a slower pace. EMARKETER's analysis is that viewer growth is outrunning advertiser demand, leaving FAST ad rates low and premium inventory available, and Wurl found fill rates continuing to fall as content supply exceeds ad investment. The reasons EMARKETER cites for advertiser hesitation are fragmentation across 2,172 channels, weak program-level metadata (only 9.2% of CTV advertisers prioritize program-level contextual targeting, and 54% say better metadata would drive more spending), viewer churn in the absence of exclusive content, and measurement standards that differ by platform. HappyKids' MLB deal is an attempt to secure inventory that sells under those conditions: a known brand watched by families together.
Usage is highest in Latin America and southern Europe. Omdia's monthly FAST usage figures are 53% in Mexico, 40% in Brazil, 35% in Spain, 26% in the UK, 25% in Germany and 17% in France; Omdia has published no figure for Korea. In Korea, Samsung TV Plus carries about 100 free channels and on Jan. 29, 2026 became the first domestic FAST platform to add 24-hour terrestrial news channels, KBS News 24 and SBS No.1 News Live. Domestic suppliers such as NEW ID (뉴 아이디) provide entertainment and factual channels, but no case has been confirmed of a sports league's own content on a Korean FAST service.
Global FAST revenue outlook and U.S. FAST platform viewers. Source: Omdia, EMARKETER
Monthly FAST usage by country. Source: Omdia
KBO passes 11 million in 626 games, TVING usage up 26%; online kids content stays with youth-player coaching
The KBO League (KBO 리그) reached cumulative attendance of 11,049,504 on Sept. 12 after 626 games, its second straight season above 11 million and 17 games ahead of last year's record pace (Financial News 파이낸셜뉴스, Sept. 12). Last season's record total was 12,312,519, but a heat wave and slumps by popular clubs cut average per-game attendance by close to 9% in August, leaving a 13 million finish dependent on the remaining schedule (Edaily 이데일리, Aug. 26).
TVING (티빙) holds the online rights. TVING secured the 2024-2026 KBO wired and wireless rights for KRW 135 billion (about $99 million) over three years, and CJ ENM disclosed a 2027-2031 five-year contract on Aug. 6. The fee was withheld in the disclosure; industry estimates put it at about KRW 450 billion ($329 million), or KRW 90 billion ($66 million) a year. As rights concentrated on TVING, viewing metrics moved with them: a June analysis by IGAWorks (아이지에이웍스) found TVING usage time up 26% after the 2026 season opened, with women in their 20s to 40s making up 57% of stadium attendees, and in a March report by the Korea Creative Content Agency (한국콘텐츠진흥원) 24.3% of respondents said they subscribe to a streaming service to watch sports, up 8.9 points from 15.4% a year earlier.
The KBO's touchpoint with children is at the ballpark. The league launched in 1982 under the slogan "dreams and hope for children," and the Doosan Bears (두산 베어스)-LG Twins (LG 트윈스) Children's Day matchup at Jamsil has run since 1998 (Money Today 머니투데이, May 5). Online, its content points at youth players rather than child fans. In April the KBO tendered for a production agency to make league feature videos, youth development content and injury-prevention education content, funded by a Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism (문화체육관광부) grant, and since Aug. 15 it has been posting KBO Legend Lesson (크보 레전드 레슨, "Krere"), a four-part pitching series with commentator Yoon Suk-min (윤석민), on its official YouTube channel. The series is aimed at youth players without access to professional coaching (Star News 스타뉴스, Aug. 15).
The KBO's official YouTube channel grew from 98,000 subscribers in December 2023 to 262,000 in March 2025, a gain that followed TVING's 2024 rights deal, which let the league and clubs use full-game footage (Nate Sports, Ryu Sun-kyu 류선규 column, March 12, 2025). The same column put league-channel subscribers at 72.0 times the club average for MLB and 1.2 times for the KBO. In MLB the league channel is the center of distribution and in the KBO the club channels are, so a league-level kids channel like MLB Clubhouse would have to be built on a different distribution owner from the start.
KBO League season attendance. 2026 is as of Sept. 12 after 626 games. Source: KBO
Korean children ages 3-9 use media 4h 45m a day, 94.8% on YouTube: the outlets are YouTube and TV
In the Korea Press Foundation's (한국언론진흥재단) 2023 Children's Media Use Survey, children ages 3-9 in Korea spent an average of 4 hours 45 minutes a day on media: 2 hours 10 minutes on television, 1 hour 21 minutes on smartphones, 48 minutes on tablets and 26 minutes on computers. Online video platform use was 78.7%, 94.8% of child users watched YouTube and Netflix came second at 17.7%; 51.5% of children watched short-form video, mostly YouTube Shorts. The survey runs every three years with about 2,674 guardians.
Those figures overlap with MLB's reason for choosing YouTube Kids as its first outlet, because Korean children's video use is also concentrated on YouTube and the TV set. The difference opens on the free TV side. In the U.S., HappyKids is an app on Roku, Fire TV, Samsung TV Plus and other connected-TV platforms; Samsung TV Plus in Korea carries kids-genre channels, but no case has been confirmed of a professional league supplying purpose-made children's content to a free TV app there.
TVING's 2027-2031 contract is reported to include domestic and overseas video rights alongside live rights, so who makes kids highlight edits or animation depends on how those rights are divided between the league and the rights holder. MLB made the content itself and distributed it on YouTube and HappyKids; the KBO produces league feature videos through outsourced tenders with a focus on youth education, which leaves fan-facing children's originals outside the league's current scope.
Media use among Korean children ages 3-9. Source: Korea Press Foundation, 2023 Children's Media Use Survey
League production, kids-platform distribution, brand partners: MLB Clubhouse and the KBO compared
The two leagues' children's content structures compare as follows.
Source: MLB, Future Today, KBO, Star News, Nate Sports, IGAWorks; compiled by K-EnterTech Hub
Kids channels earn reach before ad revenue: what HappyKids needs to sign the next league
MLB Clubhouse's YouTube performance is at an early stage, with about 10,000 subscribers alongside a single episode past 1 million views. MLB explains the channel through 2-11 viewing growth and ticket-buyer age rather than subscriber counts, and the HappyKids deal likewise weighs reach over ad revenue. Future Today has said it will use the contract as the first case for signing other leagues, and the conditions it puts forward are the 85% co-viewing share and the 800 million-impression inventory.
In Korea, the box-office metrics came first: 11 million in attendance, 26% growth in TVING usage time and 24.3% of subscribers citing sports as a reason to pay. Children's touchpoints reach as far as the Children's Day series at the ballpark and coaching videos for youth players, while league-produced originals for child fans, and a free TV-app outlet to carry them, remain unfilled. MLB's five-month interval between YouTube Kids and HappyKids is a usable benchmark for the Korean league and its rights holder.
Sources
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MLB Clubhouse YouTube channel, screen capture, Sept. 17, 2026 (10,100 subscribers)
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Note: View and subscriber counts are as reported at the time and follow YouTube's own tallies. CJ ENM did not disclose the 2027-2031 TVING fee; KRW 450 billion is an industry estimate. Won conversions are rounded at 1 USD = 1,368.6 KRW.