Samsung TV / education / PLAYKIDS LEARNING
REVIEW
PlayKids Learning brings the Brazilian preschool app to the Samsung TV living room.
Sandbox Group's PlayKids+ catalogue — 5,000-plus cartoons, songs, and games for ages two to twelve — lands on Tizen as a TV-shaped front door to a subscription product designed for phones and tablets.
BY THE APP COMRADE DESK · MAY 10, 2026 · 3 MIN READ
Playkids Learning
SANDBOX GROUP
OUR SCORE
6.4
SAMSUNG TV
★ —
PRICE
Free
PlayKids has been a fixture of the preschool app shelf since Movile launched it out of São Paulo in 2013, and the catalogue — over 5,000 pieces of content, 180 countries, four languages — built a quiet global business in the years before Sandbox Group acquired the brand. Until recently, PlayKids was a phone-and-tablet product. The Samsung Tizen build, shipped in early 2026, is the company’s bet that the same catalogue belongs in the living room.
The Tizen client is a competent port of a product that was never designed for a TV remote. Show navigation works fine — the directional pad gets you through rails of cartoons and songs without complaint, and playback is clean. Where it strains is the games, which were built for tablet touch and don’t translate to a remote in any satisfying way. Parents who subscribed for the educational-games half of the catalogue will keep using the tablet for that half; the TV is where the videos go.
What carries the experience is the ad-free promise and the editorial quality of the curation. PlayKids+ has held the line on no in-app advertising since 2015, and on a TV — where YouTube Kids has become a pre-roll-and-mid-roll experience — that distinction matters more than it does on the phone. The recommendation rails are organised by skill rather than by show, which makes the app feel like a structured learning surface rather than a video dump. The friction comes from the subscription itself: cancelling routes back through whichever store processed the original purchase, and the in-app help is thin. For an existing PlayKids household, the Tizen client is a useful second screen. For a new subscriber, start the trial on the device you actually want to manage billing from.
PlayKids on Tizen is the catalogue parents already paid for, finally on the TV the kids actually wanted to use it on.
FEATURES
PlayKids Learning on Samsung Tizen is the TV build of Sandbox Group's PlayKids+ subscription — the same library that's been running on iOS and Android for over a decade. The catalogue spans more than 5,000 pieces of content: 36-plus original and licensed shows, 160-plus educational games, eight podcast series, and an ongoing rotation of music videos and read-along stories aimed at the two-to-twelve age band.
The Tizen client leans on the catalogue and not much else. Browsing is split into rails by show, by skill (literacy, numeracy, music, manners), and by character. Parental controls — daily time limits, age-band content gating, multi-child profiles — are configured in the phone or web app and sync to the TV. Casting from the PlayKids phone app is supported on the Tizen build; remote-driven playback works through the Samsung directional pad with no special hardware.
Pricing follows the cross-platform subscription: roughly $7.99/month or $59.99/year for PlayKids+, with a single subscription covering up to six devices. The Tizen install is free; nothing in the app is usable without an active PlayKids+ account. There are no in-app ads — that's been a structural commitment of the PlayKids product since 2015.
MISSION ACCOMPLISHED
The catalogue is the win. Original programming sits next to licensed content from Super Simple Songs, Pocoyo, and a stable of preschool brands that parents recognise, and the editorial work behind the curation — content reviewed by educators and child psychologists in Sandbox's São Paulo office — shows up in how the rails are organised. Themed rails by skill rather than by IP make the app feel less like a video dump and more like a structured learning surface.
Ad-free is the other genuine strength, and on Tizen it matters more than on phone. YouTube Kids on the same TV is a constant pre-roll-and-mid-roll exercise; PlayKids on the same TV plays content end-to-end without interruption. For families with screen-time rules, that changes the relationship between a thirty-minute block and what a kid actually consumes during it.
ROOM TO IMPROVE
The Tizen build is a port, not a TV-native rethink. Game content built for tablet touch input doesn't translate to a TV remote — the interactive games are the weakest part of the catalogue on this platform, and the app doesn't always make clear which content is playable on TV versus which requires the phone or tablet. Families who picked PlayKids specifically for the games will keep using the tablet build for them.
Subscription management is the friction users report most consistently in 2026. Recent App Store and Play Store reviews flag difficulty cancelling — the cancel flow lives in whichever store originally processed the subscription, and Sandbox's in-app help routes are thin. Parents who subscribed via Apple and try to cancel from the Tizen TV will end up back on their phone. The Tizen-specific UI also lacks the polish of the dedicated kids apps from Disney+ or Netflix Kids — search is functional, recommendation surfacing is basic, and there's no "continue watching" carryover across devices in the way Netflix manages it.
CONCLUSION
PlayKids on a Samsung TV is a reasonable second-screen extension of a subscription you've probably already bought for the phone or tablet. Use it for the videos and the read-alongs; keep the games on the tablet where the touch interface actually works. The ad-free promise holds and matters. New subscribers should start the trial on whichever device they intend to manage billing from — wrestling with the cancel flow from a Tizen remote is not the introduction Sandbox should be giving parents in 2026.