I have a Netflix account. Just now doing research on the site I found that within my account I can set up separate profiles for other individuals who I want to add to my account. This feature allows parents who set up accounts to give access to their children under their specific profile. Parents (or the owner of the account) can decide what material can be viewed by other profiles. This is all based on the current rating system developed by the Motion Picture Association in 1968. According to the site, the MPA delegates a board of 10-13 members who serve for various lengths. The board receives films from producers who pay fees to allow their films to be rated. The board members then act as representatives of the average American parent, and rate the films with either a G, PG, PG-13, R, or NC-17 rating. The site prides itself on high levels of integrity that go into rating a movie accurately and choosing the best people to make these kinds of decisions. A producer can appeal the rating, and a long process ensues to find out if the rating can be changed. The MPA site says that it takes regular polls to find out the satisfaction level of American parents around the country and most parents find the ratings "helpful." (mpaa.org, 2008) I also noticed that when you click on a particular movie's ratings on the Netflix site, you can get a very detailed description on what the ratings mean. For instance, the site has a section called "Note to Parents." Under that heading there is "Common sense note" which describes very parti
cular scenes in the movie that are not suitable for children. As well, there is a legend for violence, sexual content, language, social behavior, drug use, and commercialism which have even further details. This section, specified for any money a person is thinking about renting, seems extremely helpful in determining what kind of inappropriate material might be shown.
Unlike Netflix though, the Blockbuster website does not contain these specific explanations for material within the films. The site does contain rating labels, but a user cannot click the label to get further detail. DVDavenue.com and Intelliflix.com are two other online DVD/video stores that do not have these specific ratings.
On the one hand, Netflix really tailors it for parents so that if children want their rent videos, they can easily do so with parents' permission and monitoring. But, if a child is for some reason given a credit or debit card before the age of 17, he or she could easily set up an account and access explicit material without their parents knowing. Similarly, though, video stores make it possible for young teens to rent movies that aren't age appropriate. The one difference and often better alternative though with the physical stores is the face value factor. For instance, Blockbuster requires the customer to present a form of identification to verify that he or she is on the account. The sales associate can look at the ID and decide if the person is of age to being renting the material. Behind a computer screen, there are many ways to cheat the system and lie without the company knowing.
But the real issue has surface with the advancements in parental control technologies. Because of the rise in explicit material, especially on television, it seems that American parents have demanded more controls. With movies, the acceptable amount of violence, sex, and language seems to have risen as well, and some parents don't agree with the new standards. But with these new technologies there are some concerns. The most alarming concern is the fact that a good majority of parents don't seem to be involved in the monitoring children's viewing. According to Julie Simon, vice president of Time Warner cable in an article in Broadcast & Cable, there is a lot of new communication technologies out there to help parents monitor their children's television and movie viewing, but educating the parents in how to use these technologies is difficult. Cox community relations director also said that getting parents involved in monitoring is actually the first step in solving all sorts of problems that go further than just television and videos. Cox has partnered with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children to put PSAs on Netsmartz.org. These PSAs are being developed to help inform parents and get them involved in their children's media consumption.
The issue of parental controls and online video stores versus physical video stores seems concerning, but equally as good or not good in determining where parents have the most control. Physical stores give parents comfort because of the face-to-face factor and the identification process. Most of the time, children are under their parents' accounts. The online stores (well some like Netflix) allow parents to do a lot of research on the movies and set up restricted accounts for children. It seems that both entities are creating systems of protection, but perhaps video online stores are even more appealing because they didn't forget to think about protection!
