Zinkia launch Pocoyo-branded virtual world

Spanish producer Zinkia has launched Pocoyo World, an online virtual world for kids based on the successful kids series.

Zinkia has had a team developing Pocoyo World for almost two years, company CEO Jose Maria Castillejo told TBIvision.

“Pocoyo is a positive and educational for kids and we were motivated to give them more content on a daily basis,” Castillejo said. “It was a big risk for us to develop this, but we wanted to give children more Pocoyo content.”

The virtual world has a free area, but will operate on a subscription basis at €3.90 (US$5.84) a month. For that, kids get to play a range of games and puzzles and can also download fifteen episodes of the TV series. Two episodes are available to download for free.

The site has cost about €2 million to develop and Zinkia is forecasting  50,000 paying subs in year one and 100,000 at the end of year two.

Castillejo notes that, internally, they are confident they can surpass these given that 20,000 users have signed up in the two weeks since the site soft-launched and that is without any marketing or publicity.

The site has been developed with Spanish internet security company Protégeles. Licensing partners Bandai, Big Picture, Planeta and DeAgostini are also supporting the launch.

Zinkia has made two 52-episode series of Pocoyo and will start discussions about a possible third series in the next few months. The show is distributed internationally by ITV Studios.