YouTube has fielded plenty of criticism as of late regarding various issues related to its YouTube Kids offering, the most recent of which being child safety concerns involving questionable auto-fill search results.
Unsurprisingly, alternatives are starting to spring up.
One potential substitute is Jellies from Savvy Apps founder Ken Yarmosh. As TechCrunch explains, Jellies is a subscription-based service that focuses on human-curated video content designed for consumption by children. Specifically, Jellies promises its videos won't be filled with ego-driven online "stars" that promote consumerism, distraction and bad attitudes through slimy techniques like inappropriate ads and new toy unboxings.
The company adheres to guidelines from The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) and age-range data from Common Sense Media, a San Francisco-based non-profit, when selecting content and categories.
Jellies' complete human curation of video content is great right now - they've got just over 3,000 videos across over 100 topics with up to five new videos being added per week - but what happens if the service blows up? If it ever approached the scale of YouTube, for example, there's no way the company could hire enough staff to hand-pick every video.
According to TechCrunch, technology does play a role in helping to select videos albeit a small one. "While we are developing tech to help, notice computers are last in our list. Yes, we get that the industry believes scale is important and values that highly or solely. We believe safety and quality are more important than algorithms that scale as of now," says Yarmosh.
Jellies charges $4.99 per month for access to its service. That seems a little steep for a service with only around 3,000 videos but it may be worth it to not have to worry about what your child is watching.