An NFC movie library for my kids

The fact that so many people come up with these kinds of solutions POST betamax begs questions. There seems to be some inherent unfairness in how unaccessible stuff is becoming.. It's interesting how we're trading the convenience (of signing up and paying montly for a dozen of rental services) for usability and tangibility..

Late Gen X rant incoming: WHEN I WAS A KID.. When I was 3 years old, I could put on the music I wanted to listen to.. It was easy, take the tape out of the case, put it into my cassette radio (if it didn't fit, try flipping it), and press the triangle.. poof, music.. I didn't need to be able to read, there were pictures on the tapes, so I could still find my favourite tunes.. When we got our first video machine, a betamax, it was the same thing, just put the tape into the machine, press the triangle, poof, the movie I had chosen played on the TV..

Then came DVDs, I was older then, so it was no problem for me, but, usability wise, DVDs were a step backwards.. You pop it in and press the tr.. No, you're met with unskippable copyright disclaimers and then presented with an animated menu, where you needed to be able to read to understand how to start the movie, suddenly, the movie itself contained (non standardized) ways of starting it, selecting chapters and such.. Sure, we traded the amazing ability to look at deleted scenes for the ability of of a small child to be able to start it.. but honestly, not even worth it..

Skip to online streaming services and their crappy apps.. Jesus.. Disney is how big of a company and their app is nearly unusable compared to a stack of VHS tapes..

We're putting untold layers of unneeded complexity on EVERYTHING these days, and I'm not even sure we do it because we can, I'm afraid we're doing it because we don't know how not to..

The early VCRs, cassette players and CD players were simple due to technological and economical constraints, but those constraints forced an extremely intuitive mode of operation which was transferable between similar devices.

We're leaving a world polluted, drowned in untold complexity at all levels for our children, and honestly, we can't even navigate it very well ourselves, even if we have most of the story about how things got to be that way in the back of our heads. Stuff that we understand deeply already seems like complete magic to the younger generations.. We ought to do better, to builder simpler and more BASIC systems at every level, from instruction set architecture through to UI.. The fact people find it reasonable that you almost have to use a "tech stack" is abysmal.. There shouldn't HAVE to be really much of anything between your code and the metal it runs on.

All that aside, this is a great idea! I'm going to do something simiar for my kid I think.

I would have thought it's much less. What would be an equivalent restriction on the phone/tablet/more actively engaging devices?

We don't have a set amount of allowed TV time for her, but she typically watches around 15-20 minutes of TV and then gets up and does something else.

The only real rule we have around it is that TV (unlike music) is not a background sound. If you're done watching something, you have to turn it off, not just let it play forever.