Hub Network

Beware of director of programming Liege Maximo.

Hub Network, previously known as the Hasbro-Discovery Communications Joint Venture Network and The Hub, was a cable television network in the United States owned by Hub Television Networks, LLC, formerly known as Hasbro-Discovery Communications Joint Venture.^[1] It began broadcasting October 10, 2010, replacing the channel formerly known as Discovery Kids.

Hub Network was the American outlet for the Transformers: Prime, My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic and G.I. Joe: Renegades cartoons. In the 2011–12 season, Transformers: Rescue Bots also joined the network's line-up. From 2010 through 2014, its management team was headed up by Margaret Loesch, a veteran of the Transformers brand who worked on the original cartoon.

Hub Network broadcasts of the original cartoon (billed as The Transformers: Generation 1) aired late weeknights, while Prime aired in the Saturday Mash Up block. On July 9, 2012, Hub Network also added Transformers Animated to their lineup.

Despite a few minor hits like Transformers (yay!) and My Little Pony, Hub Network was known for having low ratings with its target demographic: it averaged 56,000 viewers aged 2–11 each day by the end of May 2013. Ratings did climb throughout 2010, to the point where it almost equaled its rival Nicktoons (80,000 a day — it's a competitive market!), but for context, Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel both average about a million viewers aged 2–11.^[2]

On October 13, 2014, Hub Network became Discovery Family, which airs Discovery-produced programming at most hours, with Hasbro content to air only during the daytime. As a result of the change, the 2015 Robots in Disguise cartoon was moved to Cartoon Network.

Notes

• Around 2007, Hasbro hosted a website called MonkeybarTV, which was the precursor website that eventually shifted domains and evolved into The Hub. This version of the website hosted a slew of online flash games, puzzles, toy commercials and even small tidbits of cartoon episodes from both the Transformers brand and other licenses that Hasbro held the rights to at the time, such as a selection of Marvel properties.
  • The bulk of Transformers content on the website revolved around Cybertron, the 2007 Transformers film and Star Wars Transformers, showing off flash turnarounds and stop-motion transformations of the most popular then-current toys, such as the Darth Vader / Death Star figure and several 2007 movie toys from the first few waves.
  • Several parts of episodes of the Generation 1, Beast Wars, Beast Machines, and Cybertron cartoons were hosted on the site in 240p video quality, though, entire episodes were never fully released on the site in the multiple parts uploaded, likely due to bandwidth and other internet and sharing limitations of the time.

References

External links

• Commercial for Hub Network
• The Adventures of Copier and Fax Machine, from Huboom