Google is rolling out a version of YouTube for younger fans of the service on February 23, Monday. The new app will be called YouTube kids which is specifically designed for the 10 years old or younger kids in the house.
Initially, the new app will be available on Android only, but will be released to iOS and other platforms too. Google hasn’t discussed anything on whether it would block ads from the younger audience, Wall Street Journal reports that the company has plans to generate revenue from ads in the new YouTube app for kids.
Pavni Diwanji, Vice President for engineering at Google had mentioned back in December that “The big motivator inside the company is everyone is having kids, so there’s a push to change our products to be fun and safe for children”.
The demo of the YouTube kids app reveals a Home screen with eight large tiles carrying images of popular kids show. Above the tiles we find five simple icons: a TV set for shows such as Thomas the Tank Engine and Yo Gabba Gabba, a radio for video streaming of popular music, a light bulb for educational shows and a binocular to explore a range of top videos.
The new app will filter out age-inappropriate search terms on it. If a child keys in a word such as “sex”, a dialog box prompts the kid to try something else. Parents can also have control over the time the child can watch the video by setting a password. When a set amount of time expires, the app locks itself and can’t be restarted without the password.
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