We built this for our own children first.

Our children would open YouTube, watch a video for thirty seconds, swipe, watch another for thirty seconds, swipe again. An hour later they’d consumed forty videos and absorbed none of them. And somewhere in there the algorithm would have hunted its way to something we really didn’t want them watching.

We tried the obvious things. YouTube Children. Time limits. Hiding the iPad. None of it worked because none of it changed the fundamental mechanic: the device’s job is to keep the swipe going.

Inspired by Tonies

What did work, for audio, was Tonies — the German invention where children put a figurine on a speaker box and the music or audiobook just plays. Our children loved it. They’d pick a figurine, listen to the whole story, put it back, pick another one. No scrolling, no algorithm, no five-second swipe. The physical object was the choice. The box played one thing. That was it.

We kept looking for the same thing for video and couldn’t find it. So we built it.

What Charms is

A wheel of physical cards beside your living-room TV. Each card is one video — curated, with a watercolor illustration on the front and a QR code on the back. A small box plugs into the TV. Your child picks a card, scans it on the handheld scanner, the video plays, and when it’s done the screen goes dark. (Most families start with one Box in the living room. Extra Boxes plug into any TV — bedroom, playroom, grandparents’ house.)

If they want another one, they pick another card. The act of picking is the friction. The friction is the feature.

What’s on the cards

We don’t make the videos. YouTube has a few billion of them, and a lot of them are extraordinary — science explainers, music lessons, craft tutorials, animated shorts, nature documentaries, gentle storytelling. The problem was never the supply. It was the mechanism that surfaces them.

Every card points to one curated video — and carries a Charms-written title, a short description, an age classification, and a handful of age-appropriate vocabulary words. Across the library the cards span an extremely wide range of topics and interests, from volcanoes and orchestras to origami and the ocean floor.

Charms is, more honestly, YouTube with a different wrapper. The videos are the same. The selection is curated and the delivery is one-card-at-a-time. The whole product is the wrapper.