LOS ANGELES—The Parents Television and Media Council (PTC) has welcomed Hulu’s decision to update its parental controls by adding PIN-restrictions to prevent kids from flipping between child and adult profiles. The PTC had asked Hulu to make after finding that Hulu’s parental controls were the worst of all the top streaming platforms.

“We are glad Hulu made an improvement to its parental controls by adding PIN-restrictions to a user’s profile,” said PTC president Tim Winter. “This is a simple, yet critical, change that we had urged Hulu to implement after our research found were extremely lax compared to other top streamers.” 

Winter warned however that “Hulu still has to make significant improvements to make its parental controls as good as or better than the other top streamers. For instance, children can still access age-inappropriate PG-13 and TV-14-rated content through a ‘kid’ profile, and Hulu should work on a solution to prevent that from happening. Even a ‘teen’ profile allows the user to access TV-MA or R-rated content. With Hulu’s platform containing adult content like ‘teen comedy’ `PEN15,' `A Teacher,' `Harlots,' among others, it is imperative that Disney-owned Hulu is prioritizing child safety.”

“All streaming platforms should work together to develop and implement standardized industry best practices for parental controls, given the lack of uniformity between platforms,” Winter continued. “Parents should be able to trust that all platforms are prioritizing consistent parental controls, especially given the popularity of streaming. Just as car manufacturers must meet the same safety criteria, so should streamers with influential – and potentially harmful – content.” 

The Parents Television and Media Council was founded in 1995 to ensure that children are not constantly assaulted by sex, violence and profanity on television and in other media and currently has more than 1.4 million members. 

LOS ANGELES—The Parents Television Council (PTC) has its own list of New Year’s Resolutions for the entertainment industry and its government oversight, including its continued effort to update the content ratings system.

PTC calls on the FCC to push for what it calls “meaningful reform” of the age-based TV content ratings system and push streaming platforms to adhere to a new system. In 2019, PTC provided a research report that there is currently more profanity and violence on TV than there was a decade ago.

The PTC calls out a number of the programs and studios/networks behind such content that it says sexualizes children. This includes Disney and the Hulu series (Disney owns Hulu) “PEN15”, Netflix programs “Cuties” and “Big Mouth” and HBO’s “Euphoria.”

Resolutions were also offered for Congress to pass an updated version of the Family Movie Act of 2005 in the hope of filtering out explicit content from streaming platforms, and President Elect Joe Biden’s incoming Justice Department, who PTC believes should “vigorously enforce” obscentiy and child pornography laws, including prosecuting entertainment companies that “sexually exploit children for profit.”

In addition, even after COVID-19 pandemic restrictions that required creative solutions to on-screen intimacy are lifted, PTC wants TV and movie productions to continue to be judicious in how they depict on-screen intimacy.

“Last year, children were increasingly on screens due to the pandemic, and we anticipate this trend will only continue in 2021. That leaves children even more vulnerable to being exposed to explicit content that Hollywood markets to them. Yet there are things that Hollywood companies and Washington can do to better protect children, and we are urging them to resolve to make significant changes this year,” said PTC President Tim Winter. “We sincerely believe that these changes can happen for the betterment of our children and families across the U.S. Hollywood can use its influence for good, and there is no better cause than to invest in and lift up the youngest generations.”

LOS ANGELES—There is more profanity and violence in primetime programming presently than there was a decade ago, according to a new research report from the Parents Television Council. Despite the increase in these shows, PTC points out that there have not been changes in the age-based content ratings used by the networks.

For programs rated TV-PG, PTC found that there was 28% more violence and 43.5% profanity in primetime broadcast programs from the 2017 and 2018 TV season than the 2007 and 2008 season. For TV-14 programs, PTC found a more than 150% increase in violence and 62% increase in profanity using the same years.

Other findings from PTC’s report indicate that there are now more TV-14 rated shows than those rated TV-PG, while from 10 years ago the opposite was true. In both time periods, there were no shows that earned a TV-G rating during “sweeps” period on Fox, CW and ABC, while the overall number of TV-G rated shows number five or fewer.

“Simply put, parents cannot possibly rely on a TV content rating system that labels increasingly graphic content as appropriate for children,” said Tim Winter, PTC president.

In May, the FCC released its own report on its review of the current television content rating system, where it said “that sufficient concerns have been expressed” about the accuracy of the ratings, though no official conclusion was reached.

The PTC says that Congress has not effectively acted following this report and is calling on Congress “that the TV content ratings system, and the TV Parental Guidelines Oversight Monitoring Board, is overhauled to improve the accuracy, consistence, transparency and public accountability of the TV ratings.

“It is time for the TV content ratings system to reflect the realities of today’s entertainment media technologies and cultural landscape. Bold, positive and comprehensive improvements to a 22-year-old system are needed to bring it to the 21st century.”