LeKan is a brand-new Chinese start-up – it launched only last Friday – that aims to be a sort of Netflix for Chinese kids. It streams a whole bunch of fully-licensed cartoons and animated movies, and is designed to be safely and easily used by the children alone.
It’s a subscription service, so first of all either dad or mum needs to pay the 25 RMB (US$4) per month fee. And then, using the five simple buttons – home, cartoons, movies, badges, favourite characters – kids are free to stream all the LeKan content by searching for it, or browsing through the three age categories. It has a good spread of Chinese, Japanese, and Western content – including cult classics such as Ultraman, and utterly adorable ones for the tiniest tots, such as Shaun the Sheep (pictured below). The gaming element – getting badges for certain milestones – is cute.
The start-up was founded by several former Disney executives, who will be mindful that Taomee (NYSE:TAOM) has proven that the children of China’s growing rank of middle- to higher-income families can be a goldmine. LeKan, though, is different to Taomee, and doesn’t create content or games.
The Lekan.com video player, streaming the adorable Shaun the Sheep.
Instead, it’s supposed to be a safe place for kids to watch stuff. Major video sites such as Youku and Qiyi have some licensed cartoons, but not everything on those sites is safe for children, and they lack any form of parental controls.
From playing around with Lekan I see that it has an impressive amount of licensed content already on-board. Also, all content has been nicely localized, with voice dubbing or Chinese subtitles. The only area that could be strengthened right now is the animated movies section, which has only classic Chinese animations, and nothing for the top-most 9-12 age bracket.
Give LeKan a try with a free login that’s good for two weeks, or hit me on either Twitter or Sina Weibo – @sirsteven on both those services – for an invite to a full two-day trial account. Note that streaming content is inevitably geo-restricted to mainland China.
[Hat-tip: DigiCha]
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