Parents concerned with their kids watching explicit and inappropriate content on YouTube may want to check out Google’s newest offering today.
YouTube today launched a free new app for iOS and Android called YouTube Kids that “makes it safer and easier for children to find videos on topics they want to explore.”
“This is the first step toward reimagining YouTube for families, but with your help, the app will continue to get better over time,” wrote YouTube Kids Group Project Manager Shimrit Ben-Yair.
The app features family-friendly content that is appropriate for kids with four playlist categories: Shows, Music, Learning and Explore. Content ranges from Sesame Street to math tutorials. Parents will have the ability to enable a built-in timer, and toggle the search and sound settings.
YouTube has a safety mode and bans explicit sexual content on its main site, but the new app is designed to give parents peace of mind as their children browse through videos hosted on the Google-owned site. YouTube Kids is also much more simple to navigate than YouTube’s regular hub.
The idea of creating a video hub specifically for kids is similar to the backbone of Magicflix, a new Seattle startup that provides a curated video service for kids with safe and age-appropriate content.
