Direct access (fingers) vs indirect access (remote)

Is it because of the touch screen? You can't do that on a TV .....yet

Personal screens engage in a way shared ones don’t. Whether this is a good or bad thing is left as an exercise for the reader.

The modern equivalent of having a tv in your bedroom?

you need to fully extend this hypothesis with an apple watch and the waterloo imax

That might be helped by the infuriating interface on the TV. Assuming it’s as bad as it is on the Apple TV. I like to consider myself a connoisseur or the controller. But I make it do what I want maybe a third of the time 😂 Definitely their fault and not my aging reflexes.

Interesting - is it because of no auto playing on the home page bit?

(That they don't respond to iPlayer on TV I mean )

The touch user interface, probably. UI for streaming services on TVs is pretty uniformly terrible.

No! Literally this is “as it’s playing”. Nothing to do with the interface - after about 20 minutes on a big tv they get bored and play with toys, but they both will just sit silently watching the iPad for an hour. Even in the same room!

I've noticed this with our nine-year-old too.

That *is* odd.

Mine did this, too. I wonder if it feels like the screen is in your environment with pads & phones. Vs needing to be in "another" environment on the telly. Obvs both are 'personal' settings but the little screen is just way more intimate.

My kids are always asking me to leave the room even when they're watching the most banal stuff on a TV, I think they want a privacy to TV that we didn't grow up with. Also there is something intangibly 'sensible' about the design language of iPlayer, esp since they binned off the kids app

Will game of thrones have been the last awkward watch with your family TV show

The search facility is a nightmare

Yep, “discoverability” generally is terrible. No good way to find stuff you might want to watch.