Children's content has been severely fragmented. A new platform aims to fix it

Low-quality AI-generated content now dominates children's media. Maka, a streaming platform run by child development experts, offers an alternative.

Videos targeting children on the platform are often filled with bizarre and overly provocative content generated by artificial intelligence. All of these are not age appropriate. Automatically play these videos in endless, algorithmic streams marked with ads.

Maka, a new streaming app for 0-6 year olds, bills itself as an antidote to this worry. The platform has zero ads, doesn't allow autoplay or endless scrolling, and its algorithms don't intentionally maximize viewing time.

Tanila Leta, the company's co-founder and chief product officer, tells WIRED that the platform is deliberately ditching the mechanisms that "turn children's media into an engagement machine."

Many streamers are built to serve adults, not children, adds Isabel Scheinman, CEO and co-founder of Maka. "The kids were really an afterthought," she says. Sheinman wants to set a much higher bar for what appears to be quality in children's media, which he says has been distorted by harmful impulses. Maca is made primarily with the science of child development and child behavior in mind.

Launched today, Maka's programming page is a mix of licensed content from global studios and independent creators. It features 25 shows in its curated catalog, including Franklin, The Wiggles, Pocoyo, Vida the Vet and Sesame Street. The platform runs on a subscription service, with a monthly plan of $15 and an annual plan of $107.

It was during the covid pandemic that Sheinman and Leta became obsessed with how to do this. Redesigning Children's Media The Solution? Every episode that airs on Maca is evaluated by child development experts through Imprint, a framework developed by researchers at the Yale Child Study Center. The evaluation process, which examines everything from scene cuts to content pacing, charts the teen's growth in seven key areas. It looks for things like emotional regulation, kindness, how child-caregiver relationships are modeled in a story, and how a story might support critical thinking or language development.

AI-generated content has just added a new wrinkle to children's entertainment: videos are disjointed, lack plot, or contain blatant misinformation, but are packaged in a way that looks like learning. Some of them, as WIRED previously reported, are disturbingly sexualized, including gore and other fetishes.

Michael Robb, director of research at media literacy nonprofit Common Sense Media, says that on a platform like YouTube, videos with educational coverage sit alongside carefully crafted educational shows. Rob says YouTube and other kids' streaming platforms haven't done enough to distinguish educational content from slop, which has only made it harder for parents to filter content. Platforms have taken steps to reduce children's exposure to age-inappropriate content, and that's important. But "inappropriate" is a very low bar. "There's a big gap between that and media that's deliberately created with children in mind."

A 2020 study by CommonSense Media of YouTube videos watched by young children found that 75 percent had "poor or no educational value." Children also often ended up watching commercials and content intended for older audiences.

According to its policy for YouTube Kids, which allows parents to approve certain content themselves, YouTube won't remove videos that are "deceptive, sensational or clickbait," but acknowledges that not all videos have been manually reviewed. YouTube also makes it clear that automatic filtering cannot guarantee that every video is appropriate. "There's a chance your child will find content you don't want them to watch," the company notes in its support documentation.

Earlier this year, in an effort to encourage better digital literacy among children, the American Academy of Pediatrics updated its guidelines beyond screen time recommendations, urging children to avoid "artificial intelligence-generated content," "artificial intelligence chatbots," "short videos" and "highly sensational or clickbait content." This guide prioritized quality content and co-viewing with parents rather than passive viewing.

Tiffany Munzer, a developmental pediatrician and digital media researcher at the University of Michigan, who was the lead author of the AAP's "Digital Ecosystems, Children and Adolescents" policy statement, told WIRED in an email that the proliferation of low-quality content has caused kids to miss opportunities for new ideas, opportunities for critical thinking, and important practice. Stretch your attention span.”

In April, children's advocacy group Fairplay sent a letter signed by more than 200 organizations and individual experts, calling on YouTube to address the proliferation of AI videos on its platforms, saying the AI slant "harms children's development by distorting their sense of reality, affecting their learning processes and hijacking their attention."

A YouTube spokesperson tells WIRED that on YouTube Kids, which is intended for children 12 and older, AI content is limited to a selection of high-quality channels, and parents have the option to block channels entirely. The company says the platform has stricter standards for content made for younger viewers.

For Maka's business model to succeed, its shows must entertain and educate children while also building parents' trust. "The value that parents want is peace of mind knowing that what their child is seeing has been reviewed by child development experts and that everything they can trust at Maca is good for their child," Sheiman says.

Yalda Uhls, a former director of film at Sony and MGM who is now a researcher at UCLA who focuses on how media affects young children's social learning, worries that as AI revolutionizes the content children stream, people who study child development will be left out of the process. "When I was a studio executive, any story intended for children would go through layers of responsive adults," he says. But today, algorithms, anonymous creators, and artificial intelligence tools are what children see, and people who study child development are rarely in the room.

"The gatekeepers have been replaced by one metric, minutes watched," says Uhls. "Nobody in that chain needs to ask what a child is actually learning."

One of Macca's main features is a timer that parents set at the start of each viewing session to help the child get off the screen. As the show ends, a character named Maka named Scoot appears on screen to prepare the child to be separated from his device. Characteristics like these are the difference between getting a child's attention and not getting their attention, Sheinman says. Therefore, for a moment, the tension in the family decreases and the child is prepared for it.

Ultimately, the founders want Maka to help change the perception of kids' relationship with screens.

"We're seeing a really big challenge when it comes to parental judgment," says Leta. "We've all judged parents who pull out the screen on the train or in a restaurant. Let's be real, most parents reach for screens at some point. "We don't think they should be judged for that choice."

Whether any of this will work is unclear. A question at the core of Maka's mission is whether it can build a successful streaming company without adopting the same motivations that created the problems it's trying to solve.

Rob from Common Sense Media considers competing with YouTube a herculean task. "Strygan's YouTube and now on your home devices. They can be difficult to remove, he says. Rob says the real test for Maka will be whether it can grow and sustain with kids without retreating to the engagement metrics that drive the rest of the industry.

Maka co-founder Leta admits it's easy to be cynical about children and screens. But TV also gave us Sesame Street. It gave us Fred Rogers, who believed that the space between the child and the curtain was sacred ground."

"One dad in our beta told us that with other platforms, when his child watches, it feels like a race to the end of my kid's brain stem," says Leta. "It doesn't have to be that way."