Children's shows

[Joni Ward]

I respectively ask that you don't put scary commercials like Chucky on kids movies. Thank you!

[Toddwrtr]

I respectively ask that you don't put scary commercials like Chucky on kids movies. Thank you!

This has been a problem on just about every ad-supported streaming service. Many do not have filters in place to actually pay attention to what content is playing and what commercials to run on that content. Hulu got into some hot water a few years back for playing ads for more mature movies and products on children's content. Paramount+ routinely runs ads for their TV-MA content prior to any program you choose to watch - I remember seeing ads for their series "Fear" pre-loaded prior to the younger-audience focused "Star Trek Prodigy" before it got pulled from the service. The CW app routinely runs ads for HIV prevention medications on all programming. Even iHeart Radio often plays ads for Trojan condoms on many of their artist-focused user-personalized Christian radio stations.

[ag-87]

Hi,

While I don’t watch ad-based movies or tv shows myself, I’d certainly vote in favor of them implementing this simple enhancement to help those who do. Also, it would help distinguish Vudu from the other services; even given that it sounds like many other services are doing it wrong, they can make themselves one that gets it right.

While I don’t know what their code looks like, the basic design concept for this enhancement is actually very simple:

1: Add a binary field to the movie/tv show database “KidsShow?” (or alternatively and better yet, leverage any existing field with ratings information so there is no need to add a new field which probably means in the later step #4 looking in such a field for rated “G”)

2: Set the most obvious kids movies/shows to true and default the rest of the shows to false (any missing as true can be changed later such as if a customer reports it; better some than none). Again, this is assuming the information is not already available in some existing ratings field in which case there is nothing to do for this step.

3: Add a corresponding “KidsAppropriate?” binary field to the advertisement database and assign each advertisement a true/false value (or alternatively, assign a general rating such as “G”, “R”, etc.).

4: Enhance the code that plays advertisements to first check if the shows database KidsShow field is true and the advertisement database KidsAppropriate field is false. If that condition is true (meaning that it is NOT appropriate), then try the next advertisement and so on until one that IS appropriate is found (so the check to find one is in a single loop). Last resort if none are found, then simply don’t play one (but they could even create a kids appropriate ad for their own service (if they don’t already have one) so there’d always be at least one).

I have implemented very similar enhancements quite often for both professional and personal projects (although for very different purposes such as medical databases and game data) and this approach has worked well and has been quick to implement. The lengthiest part is likely to be, assuming no existing ratings field to leverage, going through all the movies and tv shows to find the most obvious kids shows. But even finding the most obvious and missing a few (or skipping those that were unclear) would seem to be much better than nothing.