Getting started
Quick start: set up Watchly in about ten minutes
In short
Create an account, add a child profile with an avatar and PIN, adopt a starter library or add a few channels of your own, set a daily time limit, and hand the device over. Nothing is installed — your child opens Watchly in a browser and picks their profile.
The five steps
You can do this on a phone or a laptop. The only thing you need in advance is a rough idea of one or two channels your child already likes.
Create your parent account
Sign up with an email address and a password of at least eight characters. The free trial starts immediately and does not ask for a card, so you can complete the whole setup and watch a few videos before deciding anything.
Add your first child profile
Give the profile a name, pick an emoji avatar, and set a 4-digit PIN. Adding a birth year is optional but worth doing — it sets sensible age defaults for the content filter, which you can override later.
Start the library
The fastest route is to adopt a starter library organised by age and topic, then edit it. If you would rather build from scratch, paste a YouTube channel, playlist, or video URL and it is added to that child’s library.
Set a daily limit
Open parental controls for the profile and set a daily viewing cap in minutes. Intermission breaks are on by default — a 5-minute break every 30 minutes — and you can change both numbers or turn breaks off entirely.
Hand the device over
Your child opens Watchly in any browser and picks their profile from the profile screen. What loads is their library. Whatever they watch appears in your watch history within a few seconds.
What your child sees
The child experience is deliberately close to a streaming service and deliberately far from YouTube. Videos are laid out as a browsable shelf. There is no recommendation sidebar, no suggestion grid when a video ends, and no infinite feed — when a video finishes, the player returns to the library.
Because there is no discovery mechanism, the usual pattern of "one video became ninety minutes" does not have anywhere to start. That is the main behavioural difference parents report in the first week, and it tends to show up faster than they expect.
Videos play in an overlay on the library screen rather than on a separate page, so closing a video always returns your child to the same place. The video title fades out after a second of stillness and reappears on movement, which keeps the screen clean while a video is playing.
If you have more than one child
Add a profile per child rather than sharing one. Profiles are the unit that everything else attaches to — the library, the daily limit, the break schedule, the content-filter settings, and the watch history are all per profile, not per family.
This matters most with a wide age gap. A six-year-old and a twelve-year-old sharing a profile means one of them gets the wrong library and the wrong limits, and there is no way to tell from the history who watched what. Two profiles takes an extra minute and removes that problem permanently.
Libraries can overlap freely. Adding the same channel to two profiles is normal and costs nothing — the profiles stay independent, so removing it from one leaves the other untouched.
Common questions
Do I need to install anything?
No. Watchly runs in the browser, so there is no app to install, no extension to add, and no device profile to approve. That is what makes it work on devices where you have no administrative rights, such as a school-managed Chromebook. You can optionally add it to a home screen as a web app if you want it to open like a native app.
Does the free trial ask for a card?
No. The 7-day trial starts when you create the account and requires no payment details. You can complete the entire setup, add profiles, build libraries, and watch videos before deciding whether to subscribe.
How many videos should I start with?
Five or six is plenty for a first session, and a starter library will give you more than that immediately. Libraries grow best in response to what your child actually asks for rather than what you predicted they would want.
Can my child use Watchly on a different device than the one I set it up on?
Yes. The library and all settings belong to the child profile rather than to a device, so they sign in on a phone, tablet, laptop, or TV browser and get the same library and the same daily limit. There is no per-device configuration to repeat.
Related articles
Creating and managing child profiles
Add a profile, pick an avatar, set a birth year — and what each profile owns.
Adding videos, channels, and playlists
Add by video, channel, or playlist, and which to use when.
Time limits, breaks, and viewing windows
Daily caps, intermission breaks, viewing windows, and remote pause.
Try it with your own kids
The free trial needs no card, and nothing installs — build a library, set a limit, and hand the device over.