I have a bit of a conflicted relationship with online video.  While I make web videos for a living, I really don’t want my kids watching stuff online.

The problem, in a word, is YouTube.  The place is a minefield.  Even if you think the video is a nice safe SpongeBob episode, you pull the thing up only to notice too late that the thing has been overdubbed with a porn soundtrack.  Hilarious.  And even a completely appropriate video can have a dozens of hate-laced troll comments.

So despite (or perhaps because of) spending part of every day on YouTube, I have blocked the site on my kids’ iPod touch, and on their desktop computer accounts. But what if the kids are begging to watch videos online?  Enter Kideos.com.

Kideos is a basically a curated set of YouTube videos, screened by adults and categorized, based on developmental objectives, into age groups. The site is bright and dead simple to use, perfect for younger children. The videos are representative blend of cute puppies, Disney, PBS and educational materials. In other words, the kind of stuff parents generally prefer their kids to watch.

I certainly haven’t made an exhaustive search of the catalog (I’ve already had more than my share of this stuff), but it seems to me that it will be more successful with kids aged 6 and younger. Unless your 7-year-old has had extremely limited media exposure, he or she will tire fairly quickly of the Muppets (sadly). The one thing that the older kids really will enjoy is the freedom to move through the site and have choice about what to watch.

Which leads me to my one quibble with the site: links. When I put the kids on the computer, I’m pretty picky about what I allow them to do, so I am particularly grateful to those sites that are very sealed and safe. Once a child is on PBSKids or WebKinz, it’s pretty hard for them to navigate off the site. This allows me to relax a bit and maybe divide my attention between supervising the kid and reading the paper.

Kideos (like DadLabs) does not host their own videos, rather they embed them from YouTube. One problem with this economical solution is that by clicking on the YouTube logo in the bottom corner of any of the videos leads you back to that video’s page on the mothership. Suddenly your kid is back with the comment trolls and Bikini Bottom mashups on YouTube. Also, the site uses Google adwords, a service that places tasty looking links on related subjects right next to the videos. I don’t have a great monetization alternative to offer, but these links are a problem.

The value of kideos.com to parents is obvious, providing a safe and curated list of YouTube videos for kids. I’ve heard lots of smart people say that such curation sites are the future of web video. If so, kideos may be the future of web video for kids.

Now if they would just come out with an mobile solution…

[Update: for comparison sake, you may want to check out ZuiTube which seems to have cracked the click through and adsense ad issue.]