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Netflix’s New Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Stories Puts Kids in the Director’s Chair

If you watch movies or shows with kids, you’ll know they love to interact with the on-screen characters whether that’s through Dora’s questions or singing along to the latest Disney tune. Taking a page from the popular choose-your-own-adventure books, Netflix is taking that format to their service and letting kids sit in the director’s chair. Are these bears nice? Should Puss in Boots kiss that queen? You decide.

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On the company blog Director of Product Innovation at Netflix Carla Engelbrecht Fisher writes:

“Today, we’re excited to announce our first interactive “branching” narrative episodes Puss in Book: Trapped in an Epic Tale and Buddy Thunderstruck: The Maybe Pile, where Netflix members are in control of how the stories unfold. The intertwining of our engineers in Silicon Valley and the creative minds in Hollywood has opened up this new world of storytelling possibilities on Netflix.”

While Netflix is feeling more and more like a real network, and the unshakeable HBO comparisons have only become stronger with recent cancellations of Sense8 and The Get Down, it’s exciting to see the streaming service continue to take advantage of their medium to make something engaging and exciting for kids. “Being an internet-based company enables us to innovate new formats, deliver at scale to millions of members all over the world on multiple device types” says Fisher, “and, most importantly, learn from it.”

The fun of these choose-your-own-adventure stories is the sense of creating your own narrative and also being able to go back and explore all the other options. I can easily imagine my niece watching one of these videos over and over again and bringing other kids (or whatever nearby adult is available) to watch as well.

Puss in Book launched worldwide today while Buddy Thunderstruck will come in July and the third, Stretch Armstrong: The Breakout, next year. What do you think about this new addition?

(via TechCrunch, image: screencap)

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