Estelle Lloyd’s streaming service is fun for kids and a safe place

‘Kids want it to be fun and parents want it to be safe. And it has to have a learning component’ – Estelle Lloyd speaks to Andy Martin about her children’s online streaming service, Azoomee

Douglas and Estelle Lloyd, the husband-wife team behind Azoomee (Tom Naylor)

Can you be married to someone and still be business partners? “It’s great,” says Estelle Lloyd, one half of Azoomee (the other half is her other half, Doug). “Being able to go to someone and say I really screwed up – and get uncensored feedback. You need that.”

Estelle grew up in Provence and studied at the University of Montpellier. “I spent most of my time outdoors. It was beautiful and free, but I wasn’t content.” By virtue of persistent cold-calling, she got an internship with a French bank in New York. “It was sheer willpower, back in the days before email. I think they gave me the job just to stop me calling.” She went for two months and stayed 10 years, mainly in investment banking, then had a year’s sabbatical doing an Executive MBA at Columbia, where she took a class with a professor who was also an entrepreneur. “He was an inspiration. He made me wonder, what would I do if I started something on my own?”

Having had a ringside seat for a decade, she had noticed what often went wrong with start-ups: “They need a lot of money to invest in infrastructure and then they don’t get the revenue…” So she was careful about not “setting myself up for failure”. Her passion at the time was renewable energy. She had collected a lot of data about who had invested in which company and then she realised that the data itself was valuable. Other people wanted what she already had. And it didn’t require infrastructure. Thus VB/Research, her first business was born – a “mini-Bloomberg” as she describes it.

It was around this time that she met her man Doug and they moved to London together in 2005, got married, and became business partners. “It’s weird,” says Lloyd, “but it works really well for us. We are complementary, we do different things and we trust one another. And you have access 24/7.” VB/Research was sold to Centaur Media in 2010. By then Estelle and Doug had two daughters, aged four and one. “They inspired us. We were working our way out of the company, but we still wanted to work together. When we asked the question, what had meaning in our lives? The answer was obvious – our kids.”

As a mother, Estelle felt under immense pressure both to help her children get access to online resources and, at the same time, “keep them away from big nasties”. She recalls one incident in particular, when her elder daughter googled “three kittens”. Innocent enough, you might think, and yet the search engine managed to conjure up some massively inappropriate and horrifying image. “I thought back to my own childhood and my mother bringing up two daughters. She never had to worry about what we were watching on television.” Screen time, with only three terrestrial channels, was safe back then (if not particularly exciting). Now, in contrast, she says, “It’s not a safe haven, it’s a minefield.”

I wouldn’t let my kids watch YouTube for hours. I know they are going to be exposed to so many ads. I don’t want to have to keep saying ‘no’ to new Lego sets

“Azoomee” is taken from the Japanese “azumi”, meaning “safe space”. The Lloyd team realised they could help parents out by curating the programming on a dedicated channel. “It can’t just be watching videos all day long,” Estelle explains. “It has to be educational and there have to be games. It has to be positive and meaningful.” Some of the games teach you how to code, for example. She cites the traditional aesthetic of French neo-classical theatre “Plaire et instruire” – entertain and instruct. “That’s exactly what Azoomee is about,” she says. “It has to be that way around. Kids want it to be fun and parents want it to be safe. And it has to have a learning component.” Her own children help with product-testing. “They are our biggest critics,” she says.

They have bought in programmes, and adjacent ebooks, from studios in the US, New Zealand, Germany, and Russia (and elsewhere), but Estelle’s emphasis is always on “diversity” – something lacking in the old three channels she used to watch as a kid. “There has been progress, but we are not there yet.” They now have three daughters and she is always on the lookout for strong female characters. “But it’s not just about gender diversity,” she points out. ‘It’s to do with portraying experiences they might not otherwise have. Other cultures. Or growing up with a single parent, for example. It’s diversity of background.”

Oomee teeth, a game on the Azoomee platform (Tom Naylor)

Estelle looks for programmes that explore what it’s really like to be a child. Your first day at school. Or when there’s a new baby in the family. The broader aim is to build confidence and foster independence. “Kids need to understand the world around them and develop resilience.” She has slightly mixed feelings about BBC programmes. “The BBC is quality. It has the best interests of kids at heart. But it doesn’t have diversity. It’s British programmes made in Britain by British people – and it doesn’t have games.” Azoomee licenses some British programming for other territories, where it automatically becomes more diverse.

Azoomee is a subscription channel, like Netflix, because it allows them to run all the programming without advertising. “I wouldn’t let my kids watch YouTube for hours. I know they are going to be exposed to so many ads. I don’t want to have to keep saying ‘no’ to new Lego sets.” And the chat rooms on certain video games are “appalling – you don’t want your kids exposed”. It’s not surprising that Estelle also sits on the Income Generation Board of the NSPCC.

Azoomee has been a godsend to a lot of parents during lockdown, when the traffic has increased 40 times over. Having acquired Da Vinci Media in 2019 (tagline, “Be amazed every day”) with a presence in Eastern Europe, Africa, and South East Asia, they now have around 47 million kids around the world watching their programmes. But the fact is that Estelle is no fan of home schooling. “Hopefully, it’s a short-lived experiment,” she says. “I love to spend time with my kids. But I work full time and I always thought they should go to school.” She argues that, in the wake of so many potentially anxiety-inducing phenomena, parents are bound to try and create a safe and loving home. “But then it’s a cocoon. A very comfortable cocoon. But home is not a school. They are two different ecosystems.”

Estelle Lloyd sees Azoomee as a “supplement” to mainstream education. She is the first to agree that education entails social interaction. “They learn from other kids.” She says what her children have been doing is not so much home schooling as homework. “And no kid ever said, ‘I love homework!’”