Parental control in IPTV

Parental control-a set of rules and measures to prevent the alleged negative impact of undesirable content on a person. As a rule, parental control measures are applied to children and there are a lot of them, so this article will consider the part that concerns the viewing of iptv. With regard to ip – television and smart TVs in particular – is the blocking of unwanted channels that can harm the psyche of the child. These channels include adult channels or, for example, movies that contain scenes of violence and have an age limit for viewing. 

The technical side of the parent control

Technically, parental control is a user – defined function in an iptv player or media player. The guardian or parent sets the player settings for the TV pin parental control is a combination of numbers and letters (usually 4 digits from developers who love users of their SOFTWARE), by entering which you can access the forbidden TV channel. When you try to start viewing such a channel, you will be asked for a pin code to unlock the view – if it is entered correctly-the view will start. If the parental control pin is not specified correctly, the preview will not start. In this way, you can protect your children from viewing unwanted content.
It should be noted that in order for the function of parental control to be activated when opening, the channel should be marked as undesirable for children to view. In different IPTV-players it is implemented in different ways (channel label), as it is not prescribed in the standard format EXTM3U. 

The implementation of the parental control

In our IPTV player, the attribute censored=”1” is used to mark the channel that has received some distribution on different media devices.this attribute is specified in the playlist to each channel in the line of information about the channel #EXTINF, the value 1 indicates that the channel is closed for children's viewing, 0 indicates the public availability of the channel. The pin code consisting of 4 digits and activation of the parental control function is set in the program settings. After that, when viewing the channel, if it is marked with the censored attribute in the playlist, a pop-up window will be displayed, in which the player will be asked to enter the pin code. If the input is successful, the channel will be viewed, if it is not successful, the player will inform about it and the viewing will not start. 

Full information about how to enable parental control for selective channels you can see in the user manual item 5.1 "Settings screen" and item 6 "Supported attributes EXTM3U".