Show HN: KidScreen, a finite YouTube shelf chosen by parents

I’d be in the market for this, but didn’t get enough info to sign up.

My first questions were: - do I need a YouTube account? - do I need a premium YouTube account? - can I use it on my tv? - and more generally, how does it work? (Which should answer all above)

Current solution is: download YouTube videos my son is interested in to Plex, watch them on the tv (or iPad)

I also have YouTube premium, but barely use it.

YouTube Kids in theory solves all my problems, the issue is that it's garbage software where the most important features are broken. For example I recently went on a long trip and grabbed the kids tablet. Only to discover after leaving the house, that all the previously downloaded videos were gone, and all the new ones that the app had chosen from among my whitelisted channels had "failed to download", despite having been at home on the wifi for weeks, so without internet connectivity, the app had nothing at all.

As others have pointed out, the things I am looking for in a YouTube kids replacement is quite specific and detailed, and the landing page provides not an iota of evidence that I will get that.

I like the idea.

I solved the issue by building an extra Android Launcher for the kids, where you can add apps and videos, but then you have the problem that you can't configure your own launcher on all tablets (e.g. Fire Tablets).

Hey i'd love to use it but may be add a little more description in the landing page to build confidencee before a parent can signup for the service! That has kept me away from signing up TBH. The premise of the product seems promising. I was thinking of building a whole device for parents to block content on the https traffic level

Agree with other commenters this needs a better landing page with some screens or a video demo. Especially for a product where building trust with your family would be a necessity.

Interested in this, but to work on an ipad that has youtube.com blocked via ScreenTime I imagine it probably wont work (unless you unblock youtube.com and the youtube becomes accessible via the browser). Unless they have found a way round this problem?

Looks interesting but I would want some public information about how it works and who is doing it, etc... The complete lack of any available details must be stopping many potential users.

YouTube Kids already has a whitelist mode. We use it all the time for our 8 year old.

I love this! Thank you OP.

Feature suggestion: Invite another parent on the Family page. It would be cool if both my wife and I were able to add approved videos.

How does it stop Youtube from showing recommendations?

Sell this to school districts. This is what Google should have done from the beginning.

It'd be so cool if you could customize the shelf according to kids' interests etc

I, too, am a parent of a toddler who would like more control over what YouTube feeds my kid's brain.

It's almost as if YouTube should be the responsible party here, and yet... isn't.

I'm on the verge of building my own frontend to YT and using open source tooling to download only what I approve of, since their algo keeps shoving shit en masse at my kid.

Oh, and I have no idea what this app does, and don't care to sign up just to find out. Not cool.

Friction is the problem with something like this. If my kid grabs my phone, or uses the LG TV Youtube App, or the Apple TV app, or the PlayStation 5, can all of those default to KidScreen?

If it can't solve all those, there's absolutely no utility for me. If I were willing to become the kind of authoritarian taskmaster that tightly controls which devices my kids use to watch something at all times, I would already not need KidScreen.

Technically, 0 is a finite number. It's also the optimal number of youtube videos for a kid.

See also FreeTube

Details please.