One of the few compelling arguments for TV is that it's excellent for teaching language to first learners. My wife and I have a bilingual family, English and Japanese, but we live where there are no Japanese speakers my children's age to socialize with. A subscription to a few Japanese TV channels has been instrumental in passively supplementing language acquisition. It's the only reason we have a TV in the house at all.
It's complicated for a few reasons. First, my daughter is too young to read, and she won't be ready to read Japanese for a very long time since it's much more work to achieve literacy than for English.
Second, with iOS and the Apple ecosystem generally, you have to contend with arbitrary and draconian region lockout. It's not as simple as just switching the phone to a different language, you have to maintain a separate Apple ID to get content from Japanese stores, and in many cases, a Japanese credit card and/or bank account, and sometimes even a Japanese IP address!! Frustrating!
Third, I can't trust unsupervised use of the iPad the way I can with a TV set to the kid's channel, having seen the kind of filth that e.g. Youtube's autoplay will serve up.
>otherwise make sure to include the language in your life other ways?
One of the few compelling arguments for TV is that it's excellent for teaching language to first learners. My wife and I have a bilingual family, English and Japanese, but we live where there are no Japanese speakers my children's age to socialize with. A subscription to a few Japanese TV channels has been instrumental in passively supplementing language acquisition. It's the only reason we have a TV in the house at all.