Ok, people. Show me how smart you are.
I recently walked into Costco and made an impulse purchase of a new Vizio HDTV. The thing is amazing, and has Netflix built in, along with wifi. The remote even has a built in keyboard.
It didn’t take my middle child (who shares my savvy with techy things) long to figure out how to use it. Now he’s the new Netflix king, and loves to call up all kinds of movies for his older brother and younger sister.
Being a responsible parent, I need to lock this down. If I leave him to his own devices, natural curiosity will have him seeing all kinds of inappropriate things.
Which brings me to my question. Am I missing something, or do parental controls on Netflix stink?
I can set the overall level of appropriate movies on the Netflix site. However, if I set it to – say – PG, then anything above that level is simply blocked. There’s no password override. This means that I can’t even watch a PG-13 movie at night if I want to.
It appears that I can change the appropriate level on the Netflix site again, but it can take up to 8 hours to take effect. So it’s not like I can switch it on the fly for a few hours.
Is there some way to handle this? Ideally, I’d like to have different profiles with different levels of acceptability, but it doesn’t appear Netflix allows that for streaming. Any other solutions?
