Apple / education / PBS KIDS VIDEO
REVIEW · EDITOR'S PICK
PBS Kids Video is still the gold standard for kids streaming.
Free, no ads, no upsell, no algorithmic rabbit hole — just decades of public-broadcasting children's programming in one well-built iOS app.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 11, 2026 · 4 MIN READ
The streaming category has spent the last five years training parents to expect a paywall. Disney+ asks for $9.99. Netflix Kids is bundled into a household plan that has crept past $20. Even YouTube Kids, ostensibly free, treats the no-ads experience as a Premium upgrade. PBS Kids Video, an app built by a public broadcaster that has been making children’s television since 1969, sits quietly inside the App Store doing the opposite.
It costs nothing. It contains no advertising. It asks for no account to watch. And the library — Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger, Wild Kratts, Curious George, Arthur, Odd Squad, Molly of Denali — is the result of decades of writers, educators, and producers who were not optimizing for retention metrics. In a category racing to extract a subscription out of every parent, PBS Kids simply hands over Sesame Street and walks away.
The app itself isn’t fashionable. The grid is plain, the search is slow, downloads aren’t here. None of that matters once you watch a four-year-old navigate it without help.
In a category racing to extract a subscription out of every parent, PBS Kids simply hands over Sesame Street and walks away.
FEATURES
The library is the headline. Sesame Street, Daniel Tiger's Neighborhood, Wild Kratts, Curious George, Arthur, Odd Squad, Molly of Denali, Nature Cat, Cyberchase, Pinkalicious & Peterrific, Donkey Hodie, Alma's Way — full episodes, current seasons, and a deep back catalogue that drifts in and out on a rotating schedule. A live 24/7 PBS Kids channel runs alongside the on-demand grid, mirroring the broadcast feed local stations carry.
AirPlay and Picture-in-Picture both work, video resumes where it left off across devices when you sign in with a free PBS account, and Spanish-language audio tracks are surfaced on the shows that have them. Closed captions are on by default and easy to leave that way.
There is no playlist algorithm pushing the next episode at a panicked child. The home screen is a flat shelf of shows; tap a show, pick an episode. That's the entire navigation model, and it's the right one for the audience.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The pricing is the headline behind the headline. PBS Kids is funded by member stations, federal appropriation, and viewer donations, which means the app is free, contains no advertising, asks for no subscription, and never gates a show behind a paywall. The "Support your PBS station" prompt is a single tap in settings, not a modal that blocks playback.
Parent-facing details are quietly excellent. The app remembers which kid was watching, doesn't autoplay into a different show, doesn't push notifications, and doesn't surface a feed of trending anything. For a household trying to keep screen time legible, that restraint is worth more than another thousand hours of content.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The interface design is dated. The shelves render in a chunky early-2010s style that hasn't kept up with what Apple TV+ Kids, Netflix Kids, or even YouTube Kids ships in 2026. Search is functional but slow to surface specific episodes by title, and there's no real way to build a custom queue for a long car ride beyond favoriting whole shows.
Downloads for offline viewing don't exist, which is the single biggest gap versus the paid competition. On an iPad with a flaky hotel WiFi connection, that absence is felt immediately. And while the rotating availability mirrors how PBS programming has always worked on broadcast, an episode your kid loved last Tuesday genuinely might not be there next Tuesday.
CONCLUSION
Install it. If you have a child between two and eight and an iPhone or iPad in the house, there is no good argument against having PBS Kids Video on the home screen — it costs nothing, shows nothing it shouldn't, and the programming has been pedagogically vetted for half a century. Pair it with Apple TV+ for the modern animation slate and you have a screen-time setup that doesn't require a single ad break. The thing to watch for next is offline downloads, which would close the last real gap to the paid services.