Paramount shutters kids’ streamer Noggin amid US lay-offs

Paw Patrol

Paramount Global is shuttering its preschool edutainment streamer Noggin as part of the latest round of layoffs at the US company, which have impacted around 800 employees.

Noggin’s whole team has been let go and the service, which is aimed at 2-7-year-olds, will stop taking new subscribers before closing down later this year. Its programming will be moved to Paramount+.

The service is home to more than 1,000 educational games, books and videos, as well as preschool show such as Paw Patrol, Blue’s Clues, Peppa Pig and Dora The Explorer.

There will be a transition period for current subscribers to the service, which had 2.5 million paying subscribers in 2019, according to Kidscreen, which first reported Noggin’s closure.

The shuttering of Noggin comes as part of a wider round of redundancies at Paramount, which began laying off US staff earlier this week.

The cuts, which had been previously confirmed as impending by CEO Bob Bakish last month, amounts to about 3 per cent of the company’s total global workforce.

These departures follow previous lay-offs and several restructures in recent months, including 120 exits as the company integrated the Showtime and Paramount+ brands, cutbacks at the Smithsonian Channel and the merging of the Showtime and MTV Entertainment Studios teams.