Family-Curated YouTube Allowlist Tablet Experience That Lives Locally and Doesn't Phone Home
YouTube Kids' channel-allowlist feature is gone or buried in 2026, and parents who want 'my 7-year-old can watch only these 14 channels, no shorts, no autoplay, no recommendations' end up paying $3.99/mo for browser-extension-shaped solutions like WhitelistVideo, which still proxy through YouTube and harvest watch data. The real ask: a household-server appliance (or a Pi image) that downloads the allowlisted channels nightly via yt-dlp and serves them as a local Plex/Jellyfin-style channel-grid that reads as a TV experience to a kid, with parent overrides via phone.
Sell it as a $99 box with a tablet UI on the home Wi-Fi, not as a Pi image. Parents do not want to assemble. The bigger trap is licensing: 'we download YouTube videos on your behalf' is a copyright thicket. Frame it as a personal-use TiVo-shaped offline-cache, not a redistribution service, and put the burden of 'allowed channels' on the parent.
landscape (3 existing solutions)
Online allowlist tools all proxy through YouTube and feed Google data. Local-first allowlist setups (yt-dlp + Jellyfin) work, but the homelab assembly cost is too high for the parent who just wants a tablet experience.