If you are one of those who is stuffed with eight daily episodes of your favorite series, you want to control how much time you watch TV or you do not want your children to become zombies in front of the screen, you are in luck. we tell you how to control how much time you watch TV with Android TV. With the application that we are going to show you, you will be able to do that and much more, such as preventing the execution of certain applications with a PIN number or knowing your television viewing habits.
Netflix made it fashionable to devour series in one sitting, changing traditional television consumption forever. The problem is that this is too good. It is highly addictive and threatens to turn us into couch-fused amoebas.
In fact, even Netflix itself put up a system that warned that you had been there for too long and asked if you were still in front of the television. But since that obviously doesn't work, we bring you an excellent application to control how long you see Smart TV.
And besides that, it also serves as something that many have been waiting for, a parental control system that works with Android TV and did it well.
Tvusage, the ideal app to control consumption habits on Android TV
Tvusage is a free app from Codeseed, which is advertised as a digital well-being, consumption time control and parental control for Android TV.
You can download it from the Android TV Play Store through your TV.
Doing it is very simple. Search for it in the app store by its name: tvusage. You will see that it will appear immediately and you will only have to select it and press the "Install" button, as with any other application.
Once done, the first time you run it you will need to give it special access permissions.
For that, go to the applications menu of your Android TV. You will see, that there you have the apps that you have used recently. Scroll down until you see the “Special app access” option, tap and choose the “Show on top of other apps” option.
Tap on it, scroll down until you find tvusage in the list of apps and select it.
Once access is granted, tvusage will be able to work properly, since it needs to show its notice in any application and get on top of it.
What can you do with tvusage
The truth is that quite a few things, but its two main features are set a usage time for applications and be able to lock them with a PIN, so that they cannot be executed if a 4-number key is not known.
Setting application usage limits
When you enter tvusage, the first thing you see are the main applications you have installed, ordered by usage time. The one you see the most appears on the left in large.
In addition to that, usage statistics appear to you, such as how much time you have watched television during the day and during the week.
If you select any application, you will access a screen that allows you various options with it.
you will see their individual daily and weekly usage statistics, you can exclude the app so that tvusage does not count your time, a graph with the utilization during the last three days and most importantly, the option to set a time limit for use.
It appears large in the lower right part of the screen and, with the remote, you can select hours and minutes, and then press the "Set" button.
Once done, when the usage time is exceeded, tvusage will show this instead of you being able to see the app.
Similarly, you can specify to display a notice that you've exceeded the set time and it's time to stop for a moment, get up and move. This way you will realize that life goes by at full speed and you lose it in front of a screen, watching The Squid Game.
Within the application, we can configure the time individually for each app, defining how long the break will last and how often we do it.
In the image below you can see that a 5-minute pause is set once the application has detected that you have been watching Netflix for half an hour straight.
The ability to lock apps with a PIN
The other great feature of tvusage to control television time is being able to block the execution of certain applications with a PIN.
This is a way to parental control on Android TV very useful. With it, we can establish a 4-number code for an application, such as YouTube or HBO Max. If the password is not known and it is entered correctly with the remote control, it will not be possible to access.
Here is a demo video of how this feature works.
A very interesting utility is that you can enter the PIN from your mobile, in addition to doing it directly with the television remote.
And why do you want to do that? So as not to reveal the key in front of those you don't want them to know, that children today know them all.
Digital wellbeing comes to Android TV
For a long time, the so-called digital well-being has become fashionable. Our mobiles began to tell us how much time we spent hooked on them, showing hours, use by applications, total use...
Tvusage allows you to do the same with Android TV and the application offers a series of very interesting statistics. We don't know to what extent that works or not, because checking the time we spend in front of the phone does not seem to have reduced its use.
After all, you can always remove or bypass the restrictions if you have access to the tvusage app. It would be cheating solitaire, but we already know each other when it comes to rewatching all the seasons of The Office.
As you can see, if you wanted an application to control your addiction to series and movies, now you have it with tvusage, although the truth is that its star feature is, without a doubt, being the best parental control for Android TV what is there right now.