Open Radar

 
Summary:
AppleTV provides a content restriction mechanism in Settings > General > Restrictions, where you can restrict movies and tv shows to a given “maximum” rating. While this mechanism is still clunky (restricted titles are visible, not hidden; overriding the passcode is entered in plain sight of the child), it is not at all consulted by any third-party app that I’ve encountered.

* Hulu makes all content available. While restrictions are set to restricting movies to “G”, I can view the Hulu-recommended “Human Centipede 2” which has an opening warning of “Warning. The following film contains extremely graphic violence and sex. For mature audiences only.”

* HBO and Netflix require a passcode to enter the app at all. Once you do that, there is no filtering of content within.

(HBOGO does have its own account-level restrictions accessible via their website, but that then applies to all household devices—3 in my case—and would diminish the usefulness of it for us adults if we don’t want our 4-year old stumbling upon “Texas Chainsaw Massacre”.)

I’d like AppleTV to be the easy choice for every TV, with easy access to quality content for adults and children alike without having to go through contortions to configure a “kids’ AppleTV” with completely separate accounts across the apps. Please make the content restrictions settings available to app developers and require that it be applied in any service that has access to that ratings information for their provided content.