Canada's Alliance Atlantis Communications (AAC) and Germany's TV-Loonland have sealed a $75m (C$110m) children's content deal covering production, distribution, home video, merchandising, ecommerce and webcasting.

As part of the deal, the German children's specialist will sub-distribute or co-produce up to nine children's and animation series with AAC's kids division into 2002, as well as license a further $13.6m from AAC children's catalogue.

The partners will focus on giving each programme an interactive web presence while developing a branded web portal to house sites for all joint programmes. TV-Loonland holds distribution rights including merchandising and new media rights in Europe while Alliance Atlantis holds all other exploitation rights worldwide.