On Monday, February 3, YouTube launched a kid friendly app. YouTube is an incredibly popular video streaming service acquired by Google in 2006. It has over 1 billion users and 300 hours of video is uploaded every minute. So, as you can imagine there is endless content on the service. Some of this content is good, funny and educational while other is explicit. The explicit content becomes a problem when young children are searching for funny videos or songs without their parent’s watching over their shoulders. Children can easily be exposed to inappropriate content without their parent’s even knowing and completely by accident.
With launching this app YouTube hopes to create a place for kids to have fun, explore, and learn. Google says “We’re as focused on kids’ safety as you are, so we’ve built YouTube Kids app to be a family-friendly place to explore.” and that has “videos parent’s can feel good about.”. Within the app parent’s are give the ability to turn on and off search, set a time that tells your kids it’s time to stop watching, and the app puts these settings behind locks that are of kids’ reach.
The app has a very simple and fun interface. There are four tabs and a search bar, that like I said earlier, can be disabled. Their shows tab offers content form channels like Sesame Street, Thomas & Friends, The Official Peppa Pig and more. Their music tab contains content from Kidz Bop, The Learning Station, Lullaby World and many more. Their Learning tab overs the PBS Kids channel, Cool School and many more. Finally, their explore tab offers a quick view of available family-friendly content.
Overall I think that Google made a smart move in launching this app. With the launch of YouTube Kids not only can YouTube’s user base can grow. but also it’s list of advertisers, thus, creating more revenue. As far as the apps functionality goes it’s pretty good, but there’s room for improvement. For example, the settings that are “locked out of kids reach” are behind a simple number code that kids’ can easily get past if they can read numbers. This is a great feature, but I feel it would be more effective if parent’s could create their own password.
This is a great app for kids and parents. It gives parents a piece of mind and kids a place to explore and have fun. It’s available for free for both Android and iOS and will soon be launching versions for the Kurio and nabi kids’ tablets.