Netflix

We love Netflix.

Lately the mokikids have been enjoying some great kids programming there. This means that our recommendation queue has been filled with loads of kids titles.

So when an Anime title came up that I did not recognize, I decided to screen it. I'm very happy that I screened it before showing the family. This was porn. Plain and simple. I'm shocked that Netflix would have recommended it, but they did. The majority of our viewing lately has been preschool, and in all the years we have had Netflix, there may have been one R movie we received.

This caused me to look into Netflix's parental controls, and I must say I am sorely disappointed. There are three major problems.

Too Simple
Ratings are very complex. TV has adopted ratings (TV-14, TV-Y7, TV-PG, etc) and movies have long had their own set of ratings (G, PG, PG-13, R, etc.). The two do not mix. Other media has it's own ratings as well: music is either clean or explicit, Video games have their own system, etc. Netflix has decided to only implement one - You choose a movie rating.

The good news is that the offensive show was blocked by my PG-13 choice even though it used the TV rating system.


No override
Currently there is no way to temporarily override this setting. It's all or nothing. If mom and dad want to watch a late night flick which happens to be over the rating limit, the parental controls must be turned off. This means you have to remember to turn it back on.

Which leads to the third problem:

Slow propagation

When my wife and I want to watch that movie late at night, we usually use the Netflix-ready BluRay player in the living room. However, according to Netflix, the change could take up to eight hours to make it to the Wii/BluRay/PlayStation/iPad/Netflix-ready device of choice.
You have one setting, for everyone. It must be turned on and off from the web, and does not immediately propagate to your Netflix ready devices. This makes it impossible to set the ratings and then turn them off temporarily.

Some other notes:
You can still see the offensive artwork and descriptions of higher-rated programs, but this is true in the video store as well.

The current new season of Phineas and Ferb is now streaming on Netflix. This has nothing to do with parental controls, but we are very excited about it.