YouTube, with the algorithm fired.
Watchly is a YouTube player for kids where nothing plays unless a parent approved it first. You hand-pick videos or import whole playlists, your kids watch inside a clean, ad-free player, and when their time is up it simply stops. There is no recommendation engine anywhere in it. I built it, I run it, and my own family uses it every day.
YouTube was never built for your kids.
The content is fine. The delivery system is the problem: a recommendation engine tuned for watch time, pointed at a seven-year-old.
The algorithm has its own agenda
YouTube's recommendations exist to maximize watch time. Your kid starts on an innocent video and forty minutes later autoplay has drifted somewhere you'd never have chosen. That isn't a bug. It's the system working as designed.
YouTube Kids doesn't fix it
Filtering billions of videos with automation means weird and inappropriate content slips through constantly. Every parent who has actually used it knows this. A filter that's mostly right is still a gamble you take every single day.
Supervision doesn't scale
You can't sit next to them for every video, and the moment you look away the recommendations take over. Then comes the time-limit fight, because the app itself is engineered to make stopping feel like punishment.
You are the algorithm.
Watchly flips the model: instead of filtering an infinite feed, parents build the library. Kids get freedom inside it.
Approve every video
Hand-pick single videos or import entire playlists and channels. Nothing is watchable until you've approved it, so the library is 100% parent-curated.
No recommendations, ever
There is no algorithm inside Watchly. When a video ends, kids pick the next one from their library. The rabbit hole simply doesn't exist.
Ad-free on free YouTube
Videos play without ads and without a YouTube Premium subscription. Kids never see a pre-roll, a mid-roll, or a thumbnail designed to bait them.
Time limits that hold
Set daily screen time per kid and the player stops itself when time is up. No negotiating with a child, no being the bad guy every night.
PIN-protected profiles
Each kid gets their own profile with their own library and limits. Settings and approvals sit behind a parent PIN, so nothing changes without you.
One subscription, whole family
Every kid, every device, one plan. Watchly runs in the browser and as an app, and there's a 7-day free trial to see if it sticks in your house.
Built at home, out of necessity.
Watchly started the way most honest products do: with a problem in my own house that I got tired of losing to. Put on one harmless video, walk away for ten minutes, and come back to find the algorithm has taken over. The content drifts. First it's slightly off, then it's loud junk engineered for clicks, and eventually it's something no parent would have chosen. I watched that loop repeat until the pattern was impossible to ignore.
Here's the uncomfortable part: the algorithm isn't broken. It's doing exactly what it was built to do, which is maximize watch time for an advertising business. A recommendation engine trained on billions of hours of attention data, aimed at a child, is not a fair fight. The kid never had a chance, and neither does the parent standing behind the couch trying to referee it.
The industry's answer has been filtering: take the infinite feed and try to block the bad parts. YouTube Kids is the biggest attempt, and it still lets strange content through every day, because filtering billions of videos with automation is a losing game at the margins, and the margins are where kids live. After enough evenings watching filters fail, I landed on a different conclusion. Don't filter the feed. Replace it. Start from zero and let the parent add what's allowed, one video or one playlist at a time. The parent becomes the algorithm.
That one decision drives everything in the product. Approval before playback, so the library is entirely parent-built. No recommendations of any kind, so a finished video leads back to the library instead of down a hole. Ads stripped out, because the attention economy has no business inside a kid's player. Time limits enforced by the player itself, so the screen goes off without a nightly standoff. PIN-protected profiles, so every kid's world stays their own and every setting stays yours.
There's a professional reason too. I spend my working life telling companies that a small AI-native team can carry a product from idea to production and keep it running. Watchly is me taking my own medicine. One person owns the product design, the engineering, the infrastructure, the analytics and the support, with AI in the loop at every stage. It is the method I sell, running live, with real families depending on it, and it keeps my advice honest in a way no slide deck can.
Watchly is live today at watchlyplayer.tv, in the browser and as an app, with a 7-day free trial. It runs daily in my own home, which means every rough edge gets found at my house before it gets found at yours.
Filter the firehose, or build the library.
Everything, minus the bad parts
- , Starts with an infinite feed of everything
- , Automation guesses what's kid-safe at scale
- , Weird content slips through the margins daily
- , Autoplay and recommendations keep pulling
- , Parents audit the damage after the fact
Nothing, plus what you approve
- →Starts with an empty, per-kid library
- →A parent approves every video and playlist
- →Nothing unapproved can ever play
- →No recommendations, no autoplay, no ads
- →Parents decide up front, then relax
The numbers that actually matter.
Nobody loves your kid like you do, so nobody should curate for your kid but you. Watchly just makes that job take minutes instead of requiring you in the room.
What parents ask about Watchly.
What is Watchly?
Watchly is a YouTube player for kids where parents approve every video before it can be watched. Parents hand-pick videos or import playlists into a per-kid library, and kids watch inside an ad-free player with no algorithm, no recommendations, and no autoplay. It lives at watchlyplayer.tv and works with free YouTube.
How is Watchly different from YouTube Kids?
YouTube Kids filters an infinite feed with automation, so inappropriate and strange content regularly slips through, and it still runs on recommendations. Watchly uses a whitelist instead of a filter: kids can only watch videos a parent explicitly approved, and there are no recommendations at all. Nothing unapproved can ever play.
Do I need YouTube Premium for it to be ad-free?
No. Watchly plays videos without ads on free YouTube. There is no separate Premium subscription required, and kids never see pre-roll or mid-roll ads inside the player.
How do the time limits work?
Parents set daily screen-time limits per kid, and the player enforces them itself: when time is up, playback stops. Kids' profiles are PIN-protected, so limits, libraries, and settings can only be changed by a parent.
How many kids and devices does one subscription cover?
One subscription covers the whole family: every kid gets their own PIN-protected profile with their own library and limits, on every device. Watchly runs in the browser and as an app, and offers a 7-day free trial.
Why did Oshri Cohen build Watchly?
Oshri Cohen built Watchly after watching YouTube's recommendation algorithm repeatedly steer kids' viewing toward content no parent would choose, and concluding that filtering an infinite feed can't work. Watchly replaces the algorithm with the parent. It is also a working proof of his AI-native operating thesis: one person building and running a production consumer product end-to-end.
Tired of refereeing
the algorithm?
Try Watchly free for 7 days. And if you're a founder who wants to see how one person ships and runs a product like this, I'm happy to talk shop.