Avoiding the whole quagmire whether or not he SHOULD do this; but rather address technical feasibility of if he wanted to I think all of the suggestions above, about media servers etc. are all over thinking it.

If the media files are already hosted online, why go through all of the trouble of cron jobs, or other messy solutions when this was already solved some time ago with the advent of m3u files: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Fire up vi, emacs (insert your text editor of choice) and curate your list of programs. Then point you media player of choice at your "kids_channel.m3u" file and it will play though your list of programs, one after the other. You can even host your .m3u file on the same file share as your .mp4 files if you wish.

I loved Roku when they first came out. That said however, newer Roku models laking Ethernet ports (Anything that isn't mobile in my home gets plugged in) and the lack of support for many video codec's have turned me off of them. Yes you can run Plex, however that's because the Plex server transcodes everything! Try transcoding 4+ video streams and you are going to see you Plex show it's Achilles heal. Bang for the buck these days, I've been using Amazon TV boxes. $100 get you the box and remote, and you can easily side load Kodi or whatever other media center software of your choosing to it. Kodi is able to easily play my entire 30TB video library without any transcoding needed, as well as connect to my PVR/DVR server (TV Headend) for a whole home DVR experience.

And sadly, unless you go down the satellite option with it's high latency and severe bandwidth caps; 10mbs is still out of reach for a large portion of americans geographically. And those in population centers to actually have true broadband available, it's going to get prohibitively expensive as the cable companies try making up for lost TV subscription revenue.

At least with Charter, if you don't have a "bundle" with TV or Phone (who uses land lines anymore anyways), your Internet rate goes to almost $50 a month; now add $40 a month for Sling or DirectTV Now and where is the savings? Not to mention only being able to watch TV when the bandwidth gods are in your favor. It just doesn't add up to any significant savings.

This is in part why I went with my own "DVR" solution instead of using the crappy hardware the cable company provides. I use HDHomerun Prime with cable card as the tuner, run that through TV Headend which acts as the DVR/PVR TV Guide and proxies the live TV Streams to all of the TV sets in the house.

I can pause a program in 1 room resume in another. Watch on any TV set in the house for the $2/month CC rental instead of $6/month/TV set-top box rental from the cable company. And I have multiple TB of disk available for recordings. Add to that comskip to strip the commercials from the recordings and the 1hour programs can now be watched in 45min without having to fast forward.

I can add more tuners if I wish/when I wish, currently the 3 in the one home run is fine for us. Have setup Kodi on each of the TVs as the front-end STB solution talking to the TV Headend server.

Yes it's geeky, but it's about as close to legally watching the content on your own terms as you can get. No worries if there is enough internet bandwidth available when you want to watch something in prime-time without jittering, pixelating, or not working altogether. But most importantly it passes the "wife" test, as it's easy to use with Live TV, ripped movies, CDs, DVR recordings from a single UI and remote.