HiT Entertainment

HiT Entertainment was a British-American entertainment company originally established in 1982 as Henson International Television. It was founded as the international distribution arm of Jim Henson Productions.

## History

HiT Entertainment already boasted a prominent pedigree when Peter Orton founded the company in 1989. Having formerly worked for the Children's Television Workshop, and then following Muppets creator Jim Henson into the formation of The Jim Henson Company, Orton became head of Henson International Television, the company's international distribution arm. When Disney began talks to acquire The Jim Henson Company in the late 1980s, Orton and other employees at Henson International Television convinced Jim Henson to allow them to spin off the distribution arm as an independent distribution company. Henson agreed, and Orton persuaded his coworkers in Henson International Television 'to hold hands and jump off the cliff,' as Orton told the Independent. Taking the initials from the division's former name, Orton established HiT Entertainment, based in London.

HiT's business initially remained limited to distributing character properties. Among the company's early products were popular British series Postman Pat and the long-running Alvin & the Chipmunks series. Other popular programs financed and distributed by HiT Entertainment included animated features based on classic children's books such as Wind in the Willows and the Peter Rabbit books. Helping to fund the company was an investment by British satellite and cable TV operator Flextech made in 1990, which bought 23 percent of HiT for approximately £600,000.

In the early 1990s, HiT began to branch out into programming production, notably with the formation of a new division, HiT Wildlife, in 1993. The new division began producing wildlife and nature-oriented programming. HiT Wildlife rose to become one of the company's chief revenue generators, claiming as much as 35 percent of the company's sales by the mid-1990s. As Orton pointed out to Kids TV, 'With wildlife [series], you can dub them and they carry no cultural baggage. Usually, if a drama is sold to 15 or 20 markets, that's a lot, but these series can go to many more.'

HiT's foray into nature-oriented programming quickly gave it a taste for production in its other core area, that of children's programs, and particularly programs for the preschool market. That market had been undergoing dramatic changes since the days when Orton's former employer's Muppets, and especially their initial vehicle, Sesame Street, ruled the toddler set. The appearance of a new character--a purple dinosaur named Barney--in the late 1980s had opened an entire new category of children's programming.

Created by Sheryl Leach, reportedly in order to entertain her hyperactive child, the Barney character was to sweep the preschool set off its feet, and became one of the most popular and highest-selling characters of all time. By the early 1990s, Barney and ancillary products were bringing in some $250 million per year for Lyrick Corp., the Texas-based company set up by Leach's father-in-law Dick Leach to develop the Barney character. HiT was able to become part of the Barney phenomenon by handling international distribution activities for the character.

The success of Barney and the growing popularity of other preschool directed characters, which were later to include such unusual stars as the Teletubbies, encouraged HiT to begin production of its own stable of characters. Instead of simply distributing characters and their series, HiT now sought to become involved in their development--not only producing television programs, videos, and films, but also in controlling lucrative licensing activities. In order to fund this transition, the company went public, listing its shares on London's AIM market in 1996. The listing gave the company a market capitalization of just £18 million, but enabled it to launch its new HiT Video division, which began production of video programming targeting the company's core preschool audience.