Skyship Entertainment is the company behind Super Simple Songs, one of the world’s most trusted educational brands for preschoolers, and the second biggest YouTube channel in Canada, with over 44 million subscribers. Building on its massive YouTube presence, Skyship expanded into a cross-platform subscription app developed by Wonderz GmbH and powered by Cleeng to offer families a more premium, ad-free experience. In the past year alone, the platform has grown its subscriber base by more than 140%.
Contents
- Meet Skyship Entertainment: From YouTube pioneer to global learning brand
- The challenge: Building a seamless experience with sustainable revenue
- The solution: Choosing Cleeng to power a unified multi-channel experience
- The implementation: A smarter approach to subscription management
- The results: Consistent conversion and meaningful growth
- Unlocking growth through YouTube: Closing the gap between audience and app
- The takeaways: Lessons for other video and streaming brands
- What’s next for Super Simple
Meet Skyship Entertainment: From YouTube pioneer to global learning brand
Skyship Entertainment is the studio behind Super Simple Songs, one of the world’s most well-known educational brands for preschoolers. Launched in 2006 by teachers in Japan, Super Simple started as a classroom tool and quickly became a global favorite on YouTube.
The company’s mission is to create simple, thoughtful, educational content that helps parents, teachers, and caregivers make everyday life a little easier. With an audience spanning millions of families worldwide, Super Simple Songs sets itself apart from other popular YouTube content with its calming visuals, catchy songs, and gentle pacing.
While YouTube helped scale their reach, Skyship saw an opportunity to offer a more premium, ad-free experience. That led to the launch of the Super Simple app, a subscription platform designed for children to use independently, with content parents can trust.
The challenge: Building a seamless experience with sustainable revenue
Launching the Super Simple app was a strategic decision to go beyond content creation and take more control over how that content was delivered and monetized. While YouTube had helped build a massive global audience, its revenue model can be highly unpredictable and seasonal, making it difficult to plan and invest long term.
The app offered a more sustainable alternative, a way to deliver content in a safe, ad-free environment while establishing a consistent revenue stream. But building and maintaining that experience came with its own set of challenges.
“The subscription app has been a continuous evolution. From the time we launched our app to now, the industry norms around payment methods, account management, and multi-device usage were still settling into place—what people expected from an app experience was changing from year to year,”
— explains Brett Jubinville, the COO at Skyship Entertainment.
In the early days of the app, subscriptions were tied to individual app stores. While this setup worked initially, it didn’t reflect what modern families had come to expect.
Parents wanted the freedom to subscribe once and access the service across multiple devices, whether on iOS, Android, or Amazon tablets. "The most frequent combination we see is that parents will subscribe on their iPhones, and want the app to work on their child's Amazon tablet,” shared Brett.
The real friction wasn’t in platform availability, but in the sign-up and access process. Families expected something fast, intuitive, and familiar. Skyship and Wonderz were in the early stages of developing an in-house solution to meet those expectations, but it turned out to be extremely cost prohibitive. That's when they discovered Cleeng.
Choosing Cleeng to power a unified multi-channel experience
To deliver the kind of cross-platform access parents expected, Skyship needed a partner that could handle more than just billing. They were looking for a system that would:
- Allow users to subscribe via app stores or web, and access content across all devices
- Allow Skyship manage subscriptions and entitlements across platforms
- Simplify backend operations like billings, taxes and compliance
- Deliver a user experience that 'just works', requiring minimal support
“We didn’t see a lot of other options out there that really gave us confidence. There were lots of small startups, but we needed to make sure we partnered with a company that would be sticking around for the long haul. Cleeng seemed to have everything we needed - as well as some big, established clients.”
— Brett Jubinville
Cleeng provided a unified platform that could manage entitlements, authentication, and reporting, without requiring users to learn new behaviors or jump through extra hoops.
The implementation: A smarter approach to subscription management
For Skyship Entertainment, delivering a great user experience meant building a strong foundation behind the scenes. They needed a subscription system that could support multiple platforms while keeping their Super Simple app super simple for both users and the internal team.
Cleeng’s platform made that possible with Multi-Channel Billing, enabling families to subscribe via web, iOS, Android, or Amazon and enjoy uninterrupted access across all devices. This centralized approach ensures a consistent experience for users and eliminates the need to manage separate billing systems.
Skyship now has a unified view of subscriber data and entitlements, making it easier to track performance, maintain clean records, and scale without added complexity.
“Cleeng is completely invisible to the end user 99% of the time, which is exactly what we wanted. They just subscribe, enter their username and password, and it works on all their devices.”
— Brett Jubinville
That level of invisibility was the goal: a seamless experience for families and a scalable solution for the team.
The results: Consistent conversion and meaningful growth
Since optimizing the subscription experience with Cleeng, Skyship has seen remarkable traction.
Over the past year alone, the platform’s subscriber base has grown by more than 140%, driven organically, by improving the onboarding flow, having seamless cross-device access, and increasing awareness through YouTube.
Their trial-to-paid conversion rate has consistently stayed above 55%, which is significantly higher than the industry average (the OTT industry typically sees trial conversation rates of 20-30%). This reflects not only the quality of the in-app experience but also the loyalty and familiarity of the audience by the time they install the app.
Behind the scenes, the Cleeng platform quietly handles authentication, billing, and account management. The result is a smooth, reliable experience that minimizes user friction and support overhead.“We really don’t get many customer support requests, which tells me everything is working properly”, says Brett Jubinville.
Unlocking growth through YouTube: Closing the gap between audience and app
Skyship’s YouTube presence has always been the foundation of its audience growth. But while Super Simple quickly became a household name for new parents, the team realized there was a delay between when people discover the content and when they become aware of the app.
“Lately, we've been particularly invested in shortening the gap between brand awareness and app awareness. So often, young parents become aware of Super Simple really early on because of recommendations from other parents, the content being used in daycare, or just by searching on YouTube. But there's still about a one-year gap before they discover our app. Considering our audience grows out of us in only a few years, a year can be a long time.”
— Brett Jubinville
To address that, the team introduced a subtle prompt in their videos. It wasn’t a campaign or major push–just a brief two-second message showing the app on a tablet with the words “Download the app.”
That small change made a noticeable impact. Most app store traffic now comes from people who already know the brand and go looking for the app on their own. Awareness is the spark, but search is the action. Combined with a high-quality in-app experience, this approach has become one of the most effective drivers of subscriber growth.
Image: One example of the brief promotional screens at the start of a Super Simple Songs YouTube video.
The takeaways: Lessons for other video and streaming brands
Skyship’s success story is filled with actionable insights for content creators and streaming platforms looking to monetize beyond ad-supported models:
- Meet expectations around ease of access. Today's users expect to subscribe and log in once, then access content anywhere.
- Don't underestimate small nudges. You don’t need aggressive marketing to convert users when you already have a trusted audience.
- Build around existing behaviors. Aligning with how users already discover and interact with your content lowers friction and increases trial conversion.
- Invisible infrastructure = better experience. When systems like billing and authentication stay in the background, user satisfaction stays high.
What’s next for Super Simple
With a solid subscription foundation in place, Skyship Entertainment is focused on expanding the Super Simple universe across multiple channels. Currently, Skyship is leveraging its growth and success to expand the Super Simple universe with a live touring show, new long-awaited plush toys, lots of new books, and a brand new collaboration with Oxford University Press to bring the content into classrooms this fall.
Cleeng continues to support that vision behind the scenes, making subscription management, billing, and access effortless so the Skyship team can focus on content, creativity, and community.
Ready to streamline your subscription journey?
Cleeng helps video platforms like Super Simple turn fans into loyal subscribers by simplifying every part of the D2C journey, from sign-up to retention. Contact us for more information or fill out the free registration form to access our dashboard and see it in action.
