Summary

Before I start, I’d like to point out that this is the very first article for new new Blog, DadTainment. So, yay me.

Ok, enough if that, let’s begin.

The Why

My kids have slowly started to gravitate towards watching YouTube or Netflix during their free time instead of playing. If my daughter Gabrielle isn’t reading, she’s watching YouTube, Simon hasn’t quite reached that point yet.  This got to be a problem as we couldn’t get them to go outside to play anymore and it caused arguments, every night before bed, every morning before school and every weekend.  I’m a tech guy so I opted for a tech solution.

The What

The Disney Circle is a piece of hardware, about the size of a very large coffee mug, which you connect to your home’s internet connection. The goal of this piece of hardware is to allow you to

1. Control what your kids are watching
2. Control how often and when they are connected to the Internet
3. Control the sources of their content
4. And have a Summary of their Line Activities.

The How

The device connects to your wifi, in a process that can take, oh maybe 5-10 minutes.  You’ll need a smartphone and their app, which is free.  The app will walk you through a process which eventually gets your device onto your network.  It’s fairly painless.

Then you’ll setup profiles for each kid in the house and what devices they use.  Now, initially I made profiles for all four of us in the house because I thought I needed to but no, if you just want to meter the kids, just make profiles for them.  

The way it works is every device that connects to your network has a completely unique identifier, a mac address.  Once my Disney Circle was up and running, I had at least a dozen items in my house connecting to it with mostly random looking numbers as the name so I had n idea what was what.  So, I waited for a time when there was no one else in the house, I powered down all the pcs, tablets and whatnot, then started booting them up one at a time.  As they appeared in my app, I renamed them to reflect the correct device.  Within about 15min I had all our household items identified and listed.

Now, last Christmas I purchased an Amazon Kindle Fire for both Simon and Gabrielle.  In the app, I assigned each device to the correct user, so Gabrielle’s tablet to Gabrielle and Simon’s tablet to Simon.

You then define specific rules for each user, such as the time-frame during which the device can connect to the internet..or, for what length of time (1hr, 2hr, etc.) can the device connect and you can even define that Yes they can go to ABC.com but now XYZ.com, so in the end it’s fairly powerful.

There is even a feature to send a Child a “reward” which would override their settings and say give them an extra 30 minutes.

After installation it took about 7 full days of the kids grumbling when the device would cut them off from the Internet, then it was like suddenly they realised there were other things out there. I would see my daughter put down her tablet and grab a  book and about 15 seconds later I’d get a Notification on my phone saying she had ‘reached her daily limit‘.

The Pros

• It was extremely easy to setup.
• The app worked on both my phone and that of my wife, though only one of us could be the owner, we could both monitor everything.
• The device took the blame for kicking them off the internet, I would just put my hands in the air and say ‘it’s not me, its the machine’

The Cons

• The Device has a max speed because it uses the wireless-N protocol, now that max speed is actually half of what I pay my Internet Provider for so that was  a pain.  However, having said that, I ended up simply removing my wife’s Apple products and my pc, our Android TV box (NVidia Shield TV) and my phone from the app, meaning we connected right to our router, not the device and so we got full speeds. 
• The device doesn’t tell the kid why they can’t connect, it just doesn’t connect, period.  That meant, in some cases I had to figure out why one could connect but not the other, usually due to daily limits.
• I wish there was a way, from inside the app to send a message to the kid’s Device, that they would have to hit a response button of some sort so I knew they got the message.  
• A simple way around the metering was for my daughter to simply go on my pc when her tablet would go offline.

Personally, I love the Disney Circle.  It’s only $99 and right now (the Sunday just before Cyber Monday) it’s only $49 so I feel like that’s a steal. 

The best price, by far was on Amazon.com and for those readers in Canada, they ship to Canada without issue.

Where to Get It

• https://amzn.to/2P2bXD0