Industry News
Thrills and chills: Deadtime Stories for Kids is a new television series that will be distributed worldwide by Cookie Jar Entertainment according to an announcement by Hill & Brand Kids and Mantooth Films. The series will be based on the books written by Annette and Gina Cascone and published by Tor/Starscape. Intended for middle school kids, they are fun tales of terror with cliff-hangers and short chapters, but without violence or gore. Grave Secrets, The Witching Game, and The Beast of Baskerville were published this year as the first three books in the series. Invasion of the Apple Heads and Little Magic Shop of Horrors are scheduled for July and September 2012 publication respectively. Scott and David Hillenbrand will be producing and directing the 26 half-hour episodes for TV. Grave Secrets, the pilot episode, features Jennifer Stone as the babysitter who reads the book to her charge—and then the story comes to life. Cookie Jar is in the process of working out TV distribution arrangements
Digital distribution: SAFARI Montage has struck a deal with PBS to be the only major commercial digital distributor of PBS’s full-length programs to schools nationwide beginning July 1. SAFARI Montage will add 300 new PBS/WGBH programs and series to the 650 programs currently available. “PBS content has been distributed through SAFARI Montage and Library Video Company…for many years…As the need for high quality digital media in K-12 classrooms grows, we are proud to partner with a company that shares our commitment to engaging students and teachers with tools specifically crafted for innovative, 21st-century learning,” commented Andrea Downing, Co-President of PBS Distribution. Ken Burns’s The War and Prohibition, Freedom Riders, Wild Kratts, Telescope: Hunting the Edge of Space, The Human Spark, Super WHY!, and Steve Jobs: One Last Thing are among the latest programs that will be added to their existing titles. “Safari Montage is honored to expand its relationship with PBS to provide schools with essential K-12 PBS series and programs on our state-of-the-art learning object repository and digital delivery system,” said Andrew Schlessinger, CEO of SAFARI Montage.
Please send news releases to Phyllis Levy Mandell, pmandell@mediasourceinc, for possible inclusion in the “News Bites” section of School Library Journal‘s newsletter, Extra Helping.
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