With families trapped inside, streaming services are practically an essential item at this point, and Netflix is stepping in to give parents a much needed hand in customizing their children’s screen time.
Before now, parents could select the Netflix Kids options for the child’s account, which does a great job curating content, but can skew more towards younger children and feel pretty restrictive to the tweens in your life. With Netflix’s new features, parents can now specifically block certain titles from their kids’ accounts, see their viewing history, and also set limits on their screen time by disabling the autoplay feature on television shows. Via The Verge:
The company is expanding parental control options both for the general section and Netflix’s designated kids portal. The biggest addition is the ability to remove an individual TV series or movie by title. Think of it like a search filter. If a movie like The Matrix is listed as inappropriate for a child user, it won’t appear at all on that profile account. Netflix is also making it so that parents can filter out titles based on the rating. If they want to keep everything G-rating friendly, Netflix’s new tool will now make that possible.
In a Netflix blog post detailing how the new features work and how to access them through your account settings on a laptop or mobile device, Kids Product Manager Michelle Parsons writes, “Choice and control have always been important for our members, especially parents. We hope that these additional controls will help parents make the right choices for their families.”
With schools shut down until at least the end of April, if not the entire school year, we’re sure parents will appreciate these new settings that should hopefully save the added trouble of worrying about what their kids are watching and for how long. Let them learn about the joys of binge-watching when they’re older.
(Via The Verge)