This report charts how Australian children's television is navigating a profound cultural and industrial crisis. Local screen content fosters social cohesion and is critical to the development of multicultural child citizenship, especially in the wake of the under-16s social media ban – a regulatory mechanism which seeks to redirect youth attention away from global, algorithmically curated social media platforms and back towards culturally enriching, civically valuable local screen content. However, the sector tasked with producing this content is experiencing systemic market failure and contraction. 

The report delivers an evidence-based policy and industry analysis structured through a 'wicked problems' framework. It synthesises longitudinal economic data and expert industry and academic insights to expose key structural vulnerabilities in the current childrenʼs screen sector. 

It highlights an industry retreat from the older tween demographic (10–14-year-olds), and exposes volatile commitments to local childrenʼs content by the subscription video on demand (SVOD) services. This issue is exacerbated by inconsistent and complex reporting strategies across the sector that make it difficult to track and monitor investment in local childrenʼs television, masking the severity of the sectorʼs precarity. The volatility is compounded by an 'SVOD Mirage' – where a lack of SVOD investment in original local childrenʼs programs (reporting no new children's commissions in 2024–25) has been masked by their aggregation of expenditure on new content with legacy acquisitions. 

The report also identifies a critical 'cultural literacy gap' among young audiences, underscoring the need to rethink discoverability and algorithmic prominence in an on-demand digital environment where children consume much of their screen entertainment via video-sharing platform YouTube.