Roku / kids_and_family / BABA BLAST
REVIEW
Baba Blast is a free Roku kids channel that earns its place on the second row.
Future Today's latest free-with-ads channel for kids slots in next to HappyKids and Kabillion. The catalogue is shallow but the on-ramp is genuinely zero-friction — no signup, no profile, no PIN.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Roku’s kids category is crowded in a particular way. A handful of paid services (Disney+, Apple TV+, Netflix Kids) sit on the top row, and beneath them a long shelf of free ad-supported channels competes for the same job: occupy a small child for twenty minutes without requiring a parent to log in, set up a profile, or read a EULA. Baba Blast lands squarely in that second row.
The channel is published by Future Today Inc., the same FAST publisher behind HappyKids, Kabillion, and several other kids-and-family channels that have sat in Roku’s free section for years. Baba Blast launched in September 2025 and follows the family playbook — no account, no login, free with ads, on-demand short-form animation aimed at the preschool-to-early-grade-school range. It is not trying to be anyone’s primary kids service. It is trying to be the third or fourth channel a parent installs because installing it costs nothing.
Judged on that brief, it works. Judged against what a kids channel should provide in 2026 — particularly parental controls — it has obvious gaps.
Baba Blast doesn't pretend to be Disney+. It's a free, ad-supported back-row channel that loads, plays, and gets out of the way.
FEATURES
Baba Blast is a free, ad-supported Roku channel from Future Today — the same publisher behind HappyKids, Kabillion, and a long tail of FAST (free ad-supported television) channels on Roku, Fire TV, and Samsung TV Plus. The channel ships as a standard Roku tile install: no account creation, no login, no profile setup, no parental PIN. Open it and a grid of thumbnails loads.
Content skews toward short-form animated kids' programming — nursery-rhyme compilations, cartoon clips, sing-alongs. Episodes range from a few minutes to roughly half an hour. There is no live programming and no continuous play; each title is on-demand. Mid-roll and pre-roll ads sit at the standard Future Today density, which on similar channels means a roughly 25–35% ad load over a viewing session.
Navigation is the Roku-standard directional pad — rows of thumbnails, A/B button selection, no search field of its own. The channel surfaces through Roku Home's unified search and voice commands. Updates happen silently in the background.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The on-ramp is the win. A parent who hands a Roku remote to a four-year-old does not want to deal with a sign-up flow, a profile picker, or a "Continue Watching" prompt that surfaces a half-watched show with frightening thumbnails. Baba Blast launches into a grid of bright, kid-safe thumbnails and stays there. For a free channel, that is what good looks like.
Future Today's playback stack is also a known quantity. Channels in this family load fast on Roku Express hardware as well as Ultra, which matters — kids' channels disproportionately run on whatever stick is plugged into the bedroom TV, not the living-room flagship.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The catalogue is shallow. Compared with HappyKids — Future Today's flagship kids channel, which has years of licensed content stacked up — Baba Blast feels like a side-channel curated from a smaller slice of the library. A determined three-year-old will exhaust the rotation in a few sessions.
There are also no parental controls inside the channel itself. The only gating is at the Roku account level (PIN on channel installs, four-digit purchase PIN), which means there's no way to cap session length, lock the channel after bedtime, or limit which titles a kid can pick. For a category where parental controls are table stakes — PBS Kids, YouTube Kids, even Tubi Kids do this — the absence is felt.
Ad density is also the standard Future Today load, which is not aggressive by FAST channel standards but is noticeably more than what a paid service shows. Expect at least one ad break in a short episode.
CONCLUSION
Baba Blast is a fine free addition to a Roku that already has the bigger kids channels installed. It is not a replacement for PBS Kids, HappyKids, or a paid subscription. Use it for short stretches when nothing else is loading the right episode, and keep parental supervision in the room — the channel does not provide any of its own.