Need More Kid Shows Online
One of my son’s favorite TV shows is an animated show on PBS called Cyberchase. From the website:
In the world of CYBERCHASE, the dastardly villain Hacker is on a mad mission to take over cyberspace with the help of his blundering henchbots, Buzz and Delete. But our heroes, Inez, Jackie, and Matt, are three curious kids determined to stop him with the help of their cyberpal, Digit. Their weapon: brain power.
The “brain power” involves using mathematical concepts in the various situations to ultimately foil Hacker’s plans and save cyberspace. It’s a well-done show both from an educational standpoint as well as being entertaining. The two most recognizable voices from this show would be Christopher Lloyd as Hacker and Gilbert Godfried as Digit. It adds somewhat of a “star factor” to the show, even if the kids don’t know who they are.
Today, they ran a marathon of “new shows” and had some kind of “contest” where you had to pick which four of the eight inventions were invented by kids. If you went to the Cyberchase website and picked the right inventions, you would be able to download an epsiode of Cyberchase for free! To save you the trouble, here’s the link, though it’s supposed to disappear at the end of 2006. The show appears to be in Quicktime format without DRM.
Why I bring this up is because while I can easily find popular prime-time TV shows like Heroes or Desperate Housewives online in various places, both legal and otherwise, I have a really hard time finding educational shows online, or at least video entertainment aimed at children. There are a few episodes of Arthur and Cyberchase online at iTunes, but nowhere near what their could be.
A big part of the reason we have cable is so my kids can watch the children’s programming on the two PBS stations around these parts. I can’t realistically replace cable at home with the Internet until I can find reasonable quantities of children’s programming online–at reasonable prices as well. $1.99 for an episode of Arthur or Cyberchase isn’t exactly worth it. Repeat ad-infinitum for other shows and you can end up spending a lot more than if you stuck with cable.
