Our affectionate Mickey flies away – Newspaper Kommersant No. 225 (7426) of 03.12.2022

Disney, the second-highest-rated children’s TV channel in Russia, will soon stop broadcasting, according to Kommersant’s interlocutors, partners are being informed about this. Although The Walt Disney Company partially left the Russian market in the spring, the channel continued to broadcast in the operators’ networks. Instead, the controlling holding “YuTV” is preparing to make a new channel, Kommersant’s sources say. In general, the departure of some TV channels is one of the reasons for the predicted stagnation in the pay TV market in Russia.

The Russian children’s TV channel Disney, which is the local version of the American TV channel Disney Channel, stops broadcasting from December 14. This is reported Mash: according to the Telegram channel, Disney will replace the Solntse TV channel in operator networks.

The interlocutor of Kommersant in one of the operators confirmed that the partners began to be notified about the departure of the Disney channel from the Russian market.

“Partners are told this, we heard,” he said, adding that the exact timing of the cessation of broadcasting was not called. “The discontinuation of Disney Channel is expected. But we have not yet received official documents, so we cannot confirm a specific date. There is information that a new TV channel will replace it. But its name and concept are not yet known to us. It is launched by the main shareholder of the Disney channel, apparently in collaboration with the Yellow, Black and White studio team. But this is still at the level of rumors, ”says the interlocutor of Kommersant in another operator.

Disney representatives in Russia declined to comment, while Yellow, Black and White did the same.

Representatives of YuTV Holding declined to comment.

After the start of a special military operation of the Russian Federation in Ukraine, The Walt Disney Company announced a partial withdrawal from the Russian market. At the moment, the company has stopped deliveries of new content to Russia, has stopped dubbing its films, cartoons and TV series in Russian, and Walt Disney Co., a distributor of film distribution, has stopped its activities in Russia. The sanctions also extended to licenses for the production of toys with characters: the corresponding agreements with manufacturers, as Kommersant’s interlocutors reported, were suspended.

The government of the Russian Federation has included trademarked goods in the list of permitted parallel imports, but intellectual property does not apply to them.

On September 30, the channel’s website, kanal.disney.ru, ceased operations, and the channel’s pages in all social networks were also deleted, but the channel itself continued to broadcast.

According to Mediascope, about 10% of the thematic TV audience in Russia was accounted for by TV channels that had already left the market: these statistics take into account the Media Alliance channels that stopped broadcasting in the Russian Federation on March 10 (Discovery, Animal Planet, Eurosport, etc.), and Viacom, who are gone since April 29 (Nickelodeon, MTV, Paramount Comedy). Due to the lack of foreign TV channels and a decrease in the solvency of subscribers, the pay TV market in 2022 will stagnate and show growth of only 2%, predicted in TMT Consulting (see “Kommersant” dated May 26).

Valeria Lebedeva