YouTube contains some of the most educational, creative and genuinely enriching content available to children anywhere. It also contains lots of harmful, low quality content. The problem isn't that all content is bad - it's that the system is designed to serve it.
We built streamu to give parents the tools to separate the content from the algorithm that just wants you to watch more, regardless of whether it’s good or not.
The challenge.
Many parents hoped YouTube Kids was going to be the answer. It isn't.
The platform still optimises for engagement, not child wellbeing - autoplay, recommendations, and an endless queue of whatever comes next. Parents hand over a device and largely lose visibility of what happens after that.
An even bigger frustration for some is what YouTube Kids locks out. Thousands of high-quality educational channels on the main platform - science, history, arts, coding - simply don't make it in. Parents who know this content exists have no safe, simple way to give their children access to it.
The choice on offer was binary: full YouTube with all the risk, or YouTube Kids with all the limitations. Neither was good enough.
The approach.
Most parental control tools work by trying to block bad content. That's a losing battle - the algorithm is always one step ahead, and you’re relying on someone else's definition of ‘bad’.
Streamu inverts the model. Rather than asking what should be blocked, it asks what should be allowed - and blocks everything else by default. No channel can be accessed unless a parent has explicitly approved it.
This created two core design challenges:
- The parent experience needed to make channel discovery and approval fast and frictionless. If curating a profile felt like a chore, parents wouldn't do it properly.
- The child experience needed to feel natural and exciting within whatever boundaries had been set - not a stripped-back, obviously restricted version of something better.
The solution.
Streamu is a curated, ad-free video platform built on top of YouTube's content library, with parents in complete control of what their children can access.
Every channel is blocked by default. Parents search, review and approve - and those are the only channels their child can watch. No recommendations surface content from outside the approved list. No autoplay pulls them somewhere they shouldn't be.
Key features:
- Up to 8 individual profiles per family, tailored by age and interest
- Available across smart TV, iOS, Android, browser and console
- No ads, no autoplay, no algorithmic recommendations
- $5/month on an annual plan, with a 14-day free trial
The outcomes.
Streamu is currently in active development, with user testing underway ahead of launch.
Feedback has been consistent; parents respond immediately to the additive filtering model - the idea that nothing is accessible unless they've approved it lands as obviously right. The anxiety that comes with handing a child a device is something almost every parent in testing recognised instantly.
The broader outcome is what Streamu represents as an argument about how children's content should work. The default YouTube experience was not designed with children's wellbeing in mind. Additive filtering is a better model. Streamu is the proof of concept.
