But new content is added all the time, much like on YouTube itself.įor end users, the first thing you’ll notice after launching the new application is that YouTube Kids features a completely different design from the regular YouTube application. This two-step process means there may be a slight delay between when content appears on YouTube initially and when it becomes available in the app, she says. Then YouTube takes a second step towards curation, using a team who manually samples the videos for quality control. The content in the app is first algorithmically filtered for its child-friendliness, Ben-Yair explains. These channels include a mix between content from well-known children’s entertainment brands like DreamWorks TV, Jim Henson TV, Mother Goose Club, Talking Tom and Friends, National Geographic Kids, Reading Rainbow, and Thomas the Tank Engine, for example, and other shows from YouTubers like Vlogbrothers and Stampylonghead. While the company declined to share how many videos were available in the app at launch, Ben-Yair would say that there are “thousands” of channels on YouTube Kids. Design And ContentĪccording to Shimrit Ben-Yair, Group Product Manager at YouTube Kids, the new app has been in development over the past year, and follows 200% year-over-year growth in the family entertainment sector on YouTube, she says. The problem was crying out for a dedicated application, and that’s what YouTube has today delivered. It’s sort of surprising that it took YouTube so long to address this problem – there are so many children using tablets and parents’ smartphones to browse videos, but the parental controls YouTube previously offered were so difficult to use that most parents didn’t even bother – if they knew that such an option even existed, which many did not. And now that YouTube Kids is officially available, it’s likely they’ll lose a good portion of whatever audience they had built up over years past.
Many of these apps, however, were of poor quality or suffered from bad design. At TechCrunch, we had covered several of these YouTube alternatives for kids in the past, including apps like Happly,, PlayKids TV, Cakey, and Totlol (now defunct), for example.Įlsewhere, the iTunes and Google Play Store were filled with apps from other developers who launched their own kid-safe video apps built on top of YouTube, like Kid-safe Tube TV, Kids Video Player for YouTube, YouTube Videos for Kids, Playlist for YouTube, and several more. There’s been a need for an app like this for some time – in fact, parents’ desires for a safer video service for their children even led a number of startups to jump in and fill the void, as YouTube itself was dropping the ball.
#YOUTUBE KIDS ANDROID#
Google says the app will be made available to families on both Android and iOS devices, contrary to earlier reports that YouTube Kids would be Android-first. Today, much to the delight of families everywhere, that app has now arrived, complete with a simplified design, a curated selection of kid-safe content, parental controls, and more. Late last week, news leaked that YouTube was poised to release a new, kid-friendly version of its YouTube service for mobile devices.
0 kommentar(er)
