Every parent in the digital age has suffered their curious toddler's unique ability to hit the most age-inappropriate videos many a time they grab something with a touch screen lying around. All the while kids are, in fact, hunting for their favourite cartoons. Now, Google has listened to your cries, and they have launched an app that will customise YouTube videos according to kids’ age. Stuffed to the gills with cartoons and educational programming that sits around YouTube, and filtering out all the age-inappropriate videos. Not only that, but YouTube Kids offers a child-friendly interface too, with big cartoon icons, so that the kids can easily locate favourite episodes of Sesame Street, Thomas & Friends, and DreamWorks, online hits like Mother Goose Club, TuTiTu, and Super Simple Songs among others.
Parents don’t want kids to see such videos which will impact them in a way which is not right, but it’s no surprise that children effortlessly operate smartphones and tablets at as young as 2 years. And this is not a very good news because the wide-open Internet doesn’t always contain elements which are appropriate for children. The YouTube Kid app will let curious little minds dive into a world of discovery, learning, and entertainment. In addition to easy-to-navigate icons and content geared for families, the kid-focused YouTube app will include controls so parents can set boundaries for children.
The app includes a timer to limit kids’ screen time, sound settings to turn off background music and sound effects, and search settings to limit your children to just the pre-selected videos available on the home screen. If children try to search for an inappropriate video, the app simply blocks the request and ‘Try something else’ pops up.
Now kids will be able to search for topics they are curious about, such as spaceships and how-to-make a volcano. It will give the parents a feature to control the time children spend on the app so that it shuts down after a number of minutes or hours. It can be re-started again once a password is entered. The child-focused app will in part compete with Netflix’s Kids service and Vine’s child-friendly app showing age-appropriate video clips.
