Michael Milo

Michael Milo is a Canadian children's-media producer based in Edmonton, Alberta. He is the founder and CEO of Muslim Kids TV, a streaming platform of Islamic cartoons and educational content for children, which he founded with his wife Flordeliza Dayrit, its co-founder and chief operating officer. ^{1 2}

The platform became known as one of the first streaming services built for Muslim children; Salaam Gateway reported in 2021 that its viewership extended to over 60 countries and that it had raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding since it started in 2014. ¹

Richard Hartley's 2026 feature reports that Milo and Dayrit each converted to Islam independently in 1995 and married the following year, and that their experience of discovering their new faith shaped the direction of their later work. ²

According to the same feature, Muslim Kids TV began as educational and entertaining content the couple made for their own children, then evolved into a wider mission to create stories in which Muslim children could see themselves reflected; Milo says: "We've been making content for kids for close to 20 years, and we knew that Muslim kids are really underrepresented." ²

The sources date the beginning differently, and the difference is recorded rather than harmonised: Hartley dates the couple's founding of the platform to nearly two decades before 2026, and the platform channel's oldest uploads (the "Hurray for Baba Ali" series) are dated by YouTube to about 17 years before the check date, while Salaam Gateway dates the platform's start to 2014 in the context of its funding and growth as a streaming service. ^{2 3 1}

The platform launched as a start-up at the University of Alberta's TEC Edmonton technology accelerator, using crowdfunding as well as federal government support, and its library holds over 10,000 videos, games, e-books and DIY items, alongside three linear streaming channels for pre-school, school-age and tween audiences. ¹

The platform produces 42 percent of its content itself and acquires the rest; it is available as an app on the major smart-TV platforms, including Apple TV, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Roku, Samsung and LG, and it entered the Indonesian market in March 2021 through partnerships with the country's largest mobile providers and mobile wallets. ¹

The platform's YouTube channel (@muslimkidstvofficial) describes itself as "the first Kids Islamic Cartoon and educational Channel on Internet" — the channel's own description of itself — and publishes Islamic cartoons, songs and stories for children, linking the platform's website. The founder's channel harvest recorded 140,000 subscribers for the channel, a platform figure dated to the check day (24 October 2026), not a fixed fact. ³

Milo co-created with Dayrit the animated feature Time Hoppers: The Silk Road, in which four children travel back in time to the medieval Islamic world and meet scholars such as al-Khwarizmi, Ibn al-Haytham, Maryam al-Astrulabi and Mansa Musa. ²

The project began as an ebook, then expanded into a game and an unreleased television series before becoming a feature film. Hartley reports that the film was released in the United States in 660 theatres with more than 35,000 tickets sold, that its UK run expanded from 200 theatres to 299, and that the team is working on a sequel. ²

This section reports positions as carried by the sources; it is not the museum's verdict on them.

Milo states the platform's ambition in his words to Salaam Gateway: "We want to be the Disney of the Muslim world." Dayrit holds that stories in which children are the heroes give Muslim children a sense of belonging and of wider possibility, and the couple stresses that the film was not made exclusively for Muslim audiences but for the rest of the world to enjoy as well. ^{1 2}

The sources describe the platform as a category leader in Muslim children's media, and Canada's national public broadcaster (the CBC) approached it to place CBC content on the platform. Audience figures remain dated platform figures from their sources: viewership in over 60 countries and $1.2 million in pre-seed funding in the 2021 report, and 140,000 YouTube subscribers in the founder's harvest of 24 October 2026. ^{1 3}

• Muslim Kids TV's official YouTube channel (@muslimkidstvofficial), checked 24 October 2026.
• Salaam Gateway, "'We want to be the Disney of the Muslim world'" (18 June 2021).
• Richard Hartley, "'Muslim kids are really underrepresented'" (April 2026).