Kids’ Content Is Deeply Broken. A New Platform Wants to Fix It

For Maka’s business model to succeed, its shows will need to entertain and educate kids while also establishing confidence in parents. “The value that parents want is relief, knowing that what their child is seeing has been vetted by child development experts and everything on Maka they can trust is good for their kid,” Sheiman says.

Yalda Uhls, a former film executive at Sony and MGM who is now a researcher at UCLA focusing on how media affects the social learning of young children, worries that as AI revolutionizes kids’ streaming content, people who study child development are being left out of the process. “When I was a studio executive, every story meant for children passed through layers of accountable adults,” she says. “But today, algorithms, anonymous creators, and AI tools shape what kids see, and people who study child development are rarely in the room.”

“The gatekeepers have been replaced by a metric: minutes watched,” Uhls says. “Nobody in that chain is required to ask what a child is actually learning.”

One of Maka’s core features is a timer that parents set at the start of every viewing session to help the child wind down off the screen. As the show concludes, a character Maka developed named Scoot appears on the screen to get the child ready to detach from their device. Features like that are the difference between capturing a child’s attention versus earning it, Sheinman says. “So it becomes less of a moment of tension in a family and a moment that the child is prepared for.”

The founders ultimately want Maka to help change the perception of kids' relationship to screens.

“We’re seeing a really big challenge around the judgment of parents,” says Leta, explaining that one problem with screen time is the demonization of parents who rely on it. “We have all judged parents who bring out the screen on the train or at a restaurant. Let's be real, most parents will reach for the screen at some point. We don't think that they should be judged for that choice.”

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

Robb from Common Sense Media calls competing with YouTube a Herculean task. “YouTube is free and already on the devices within their homes. Moving them away can be tricky,” he says. The real test for Maka, Robb says, “will be whether it can grow with kids and stay sustainable without being pulled back toward the engagement metrics that drive the rest of the industry.”

Leta, one of Maka’s cofounders, admits that it’s easy to be cynical when it comes to 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 screen was sacred ground.”

“One of the dads in our beta told us that with other platforms, when his kid is watching, it feels like ‘a race to the bottom of my kid’s brainstem,’” Leta says. “It doesn't have to be like that.”