• by P.J. Bednarski , Staff Writer @pjbtweet, August 11, 2015

Online viewing hasn’t changed everything. Disney is the entertainment brand most kids 8-18 are aware of. But it has changed some things. YouTube and Netflix are the entertainment brands they’re more interested in than any others.

Those are some of the findings in PricewaterouseCoopers reports out today that look at how kids consume content and how parents influence them.

It’s a rather wide canvas of attitudes of 511 children, but among the findings are that 85% of kids know of Disney, and 27% are interested in it.

In the list of awareness, that’s tops, followed by Nickelodeon (83%), and Cartoon Network (80%), tied with Amazon (80%). But when it comes to “interest,” the answers change a bit. 

Next on the list is of awareness is YouTube (79%). But it tops the “interest” category (38%). After YouTube on the list of awareness, is Netflix (78%), but it’s second in interest, at 37%. Probably, those stats don’t prompt a spit-take, but it does give some indication that the youngest content consumers are leaning heavily toward online purveyors.

Altogether, 15 brands are on the aware/interest list.

These young people know social networks well. That 87% are aware of Facebook isn’t surprising at all, but 58% claim to know about WhatsApp (and 38% are aware of Tinder) gives some idea of how much social media is part of their social world.

That PwC lumped together kids who are 8 to 18 makes many of the findings in this study seem, to me,  just merely interesting rather than terribly significant. Here and there, as in the social media stats, PwC notes children 12-18 drive the most interest in social media sites, except YouTube, where interest is equal among all age groups.

But really a kid in grade school and kid in high school would seem to live in different worlds. Even the people who rate movies for content (PG-13, TV-14) implicitly acknowledge that. So do school systems, which usually place young children in one facility and older children in another.

Where the ages are broken down somewhat, some quirky numbers pop up. According to its survey, 59% of the 8-11 year olds own an “Internet-accessible cell phone.” Wow. Altogether 92% own what I would presume is what we would commonly call a “smartphone.”

Young kids prefer to watch via a laptop or a TV--probably that being the influence of parents. As they get older, they go more toward mobile devices. But all in all, these young people at least are doing what marketers say most of us are starting to do--using all screens.

Interest in short videos is highest among the youngest viewers (38%) and least among 15-18 year olds (30%), when the kids were asked to name their three favorite kinds of programming. All age groups much really prefer “streamed TV”--for example 54% of teens 15-18 picked it, topping all other program watching types.

By “streamed TV,” PwC is referring to shows streamed from “subscription/cable channels.”  But 52% of 15-18 year old listed “drama/reality series on cable TV channels” as their favorite type of content.