A new children’s channel and a block of cartoons to be seen on stations across the U.S. will be powered, in part, by programming from Nelvana, according to the terms of a major deal announced earlier this month.

The subsidiary of Corus Entertainment has joined with NBC Universal, Classic Media/Big Idea, children’s publisher Scholastic, Telemundo, NBC and the U.S. station group ION Media Networks to form ‘Smart Place for Kids’ – a branded block of programming to be carried by the caster partners and on a new digichannel, due to launch this fall in the U.S.

‘We’ll be contributing about 250 hours of library content to the service,’ says Doug Murphy, EVP of business development at Nelvana, though the exact titles and target ages have not yet been worked out.

The programming will air Saturday mornings on NBC in a three-hour block and Saturday and Sunday nights on its sister network, Telemundo. ION stations will air the block in one-hour segments on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday evenings.

Murphy describes the intended brand as ‘kid empowering, parent friendly.’

‘We’re trying to be not overtly commercial… but we’re not PBS either. We’re working very hard to find the right balance.’ A video-on-demand service and a robust website are also in the works.

The deal stands to soften the hard-to-crack U.S. animation market, which is dominated at both the broadcast and production ends by the likes of Disney and Cartoon Network.

Murphy credits ION CEO Brandon Burgess for starting the process. ‘There is a lot of great, quality content around the world and in our library that we could bring to U.S. audiences and that would be substantial enough to carry a new service,’ he says. ‘That’s sort of the genesis of the whole partnership.’

The new venture will be 51% owned by ION, with the remainder divided evenly among the other partners.

The deal is not expected to spur any extra productions. The brand will not be broadcast in Canada.