Alibi Pivotal Kids is a strategic joint venture between two of Canada’s preeminent television production companies, Alibi Entertainment, helmed by James Hyslop; and Pivotal Media, helmed by Simon Watts. The company exclusively develops and produces kids programming for North American and worldwide networks.
Collectively, Hyslop and Watts have produced over 1000 hours of audience-winning and critically acclaimed television programming spanning the children’s, factual, scripted and documentary genres. Their combined credits read like a who’s who of the television network ecosphere with top-tier clients ranging from PBS Kids, BBC, ITV, Discovery USA, Teletoon Canada, Food Network, History Television and Treehouse TV, to name a few.
Watts, founded Pivotal Media in 2012 after departing a senior role at one of Canada’s leading broadcast groups, Corus Entertainment where he oversaw multiple in-house productions for a variety of Corus television services such as YTV (the broadcast group’s main kids programming service), CMT, W Network and OWN Canada. Pivotal Media opened its doors with a twenty-two- episode order for YTV Canada’s hit kids game show, Zoink’d. Shortly thereafter, Pivotal secured an order from Canada’s national public broadcaster, CBC Television, to produce the Canadian version of the wildly successful international documentary format, Hello Goodbye. Pivotal is currently developing and producing kids programming with Teletoon Canada and TV Ontario.
Hyslop founded Alibi Entertainment in 2011 and since then Alibi has produced 5 seasons of the Food Network/Cooking Channel hit series Carnival Eats, the acclaimed documentary Titanic: The New Evidence for Channel 4 in the UK, Discovery & Smithsonian and Secrets of the Pyramids for the CBC and Channel 5 in the UK. James directed the Banff Rockie winning children’s show, How the Gimquat Found Her Song as will as producing the Banff Award winning drama pilot “American Wife”. James also co-created and directed the pilot of “Assault & Rescue” a series about the world’s most dramatic hostage rescues, filmed through their POV. Hyslop has directed projects that have found him on the road with the notorious band Black Sabbath, dodging Al-Qaeda death threats, living with the Inuit, riding with the Hells Angels, mining for diamonds, tagging polar bears, climbing the Andes and working aboard a nuclear submarine - to name but a few of the locations.
Alibi Pivotal Kids leverages the combined experience of both of its principal executive producers in order to carve out a distinct competitive advantage. The company not only benefits from leadership that has produced television content independently for decades, but that has also served inside a major broadcast group which lends insights and industry connections to each project the company produces.