Video Site “Veoh”: What Parents Should Know

Posted by Ken

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Another video site for parents to keep their eye on. Veoh is a way to post video clips to the Web. Anything from your favorite TV clips to your own, home-grown movies. But like any other site that allows hard-to-monitor content from a wide audience (e.g., YouTube and Myspace), some of the content you find may cause you to cover your kid’s eyes.

Overall, I think Veoh has a good interface with which to find topics of interest, but it’s all too easy to find videos that, in my opinion, are inappropriate for young eyes. While I didn’t find nudity, some of the clips came awful close. Young women dressed in skimpy clothing, posing seductively, and bearing more than I think a parent would feel comfortable with if their child were sitting there with them watching. Not that that’s what Veoh is all about. There are tons of other clips from well-known TV shows, cartoons, and more.

But even taking all that into consideration, and in comparison to YouTube or MySpace, I have to say that Veoh does rate a little higher in my book because it does appear that the site owners are doing a better job of monitoring their content.

Parents should beware that this site, just like the aforementioned sites, are very appealing to teens, in particular. This appeal is, in part, due to their desire to express themselves and find other like-minded teens. Plus, it gives them bragging rights to their friends (”Look what I posted!”). So if you’re teen is someone who likes to dance around in their pajamas with their girlfriend to a gangsta rap song, then this may be a place for them.

What? I’m not making this up. The Web brings all kinds together and so I’m not kidding when I say that I found two girls videotaping themselves as described above. Without getting into too much detail, suffice it to say that I got the impression that either one of the girl’s parents weren’t home or were just clueless to have let this go on.

Now, this scenario should disturb parents, not that it was a vulgar video (although, the rap song was trash), but that these girls were thinking more of the “coolness” of the act than the actual consequences of it. Remember, sites like Veoh, Myspace, and YouTube are the equivalent of window-shopping to tech-savvy pedophiles. Searching is easy, so you can hone in on an alarmingly granular level. You find the video, you comment on it, the kid who posted might be curious enough to respond, maybe even strike up a conversation via other means.

fww_icon Parental tips

Even if you don’t think your child would post anything about themselves online, let alone a video, talk to them about it anyway.
You have less control over what your child does at a friend’s house, so set ground rules with your child.
Ask the friend’s parent if they’ll have unsupervised access to the Internet and request that they be supervised if they’re going to use it at all.
What a kid knows to be wrong at home may actually go unnoticed or seem not so harmful at a friend’s house. To avoid being labeled “uncool”, kids could be under a lot of pressure to comply with the request of others. So maybe a reminder wouldn’t hurt.