Rutube: Smart TVs Accounted for 75% of Family Content Viewing Time

By the end of the third quarter of 2026, Smart TVs accounted for 75% of family content viewing time on Rutube. The figure symbolizes the dominance of the big screen in shared family viewing — a format where the decision to choose a service is made primarily by parents who value content variety and confidence in a safe digital environment for children.

Rutube CEO Sergey Ivanov shared this at the session "Digital Product Safety 2030: A New Factor of Trust and Loyalty for the Family Audience" as part of the "Digital Solutions" forum. According to him, digital platforms compete for a limited resource — user attention. When it comes to a child audience, safety becomes a key factor of trust and loyalty.

Three Layers of Built-In Protection

Rutube views safety not as a standalone parental control feature, but as an integral part of the video platform. Protection is built in at three levels.

Level one: recommendation technology

More than 50% of viewing time on the platform is driven by recommendations. Rutube's algorithms analyze user interaction with content and can dynamically adapt recommendations when switching from adult viewing to children's viewing — the system automatically recognizes the change of viewer. Users can activate a safe mode that restricts access to content marked 18+. Or they can create a separate children's profile for a child under 12. In this personal space, only videos with 0+ and 6+ age ratings are available. Ads and comments are disabled, and viewing history, search, and recommendations are fully isolated from the parent's profile.

Level two: content moderation

Between 2.5 and 3 million user videos are uploaded and checked monthly on Rutube. Artificial intelligence analyzes image, sound, and text, helping moderators identify material restricted for children. For automatic video categorization, the platform uses its own multimodal machine learning model with over 93% accuracy. An additional tool is a system for sharing digital fingerprints of harmful content — created by Rutube together with members of the Alliance for Child Protection in the Digital Environment, co-founded by Gazprom-Media Holding.

Level three: infrastructure cybersecurity

Cybersecurity covers protection of the platform's infrastructure, user accounts, secure software development, round-the-clock threat monitoring, and resilience against external cyber threats. This approach ensures safety not only through individual settings, but also at the level of the video platform's technological infrastructure itself.

Digital Scenarios for 2030

Sergey Ivanov predicts that by 2030, thanks to hyper-personalization, digital products will adapt deeply to each individual person. Video platform technologies will be able to tailor content to a child's age and interests with greater precision, and recommendation algorithms will begin accounting for educational needs. A promising direction is personal AI assistants, through which parents will be able to manage their family's content environment, setting individual rules and scenarios for how children interact with digital services. Parents will gain the ability to build their own content management systems through AI agents. For platforms like Rutube, it will be critical to remain visible and integrable to such intelligent agents.