I admittedly don’t know much about home automation so please bear with me. I’m in search of the best option for me and my wife to be able to control access to our kids TV’s and game consoles. My wife and I both have modern iPhones and our home WiFi is a Google WiFi mesh router system. We also have a few Alexa pods. I’m thinking of getting some kind of smart plug that the tvs and consoles plug into that we can access via app to setup time slots where they are allowed to play games and watch TV. In addition I want to be able to have a kill switch where I can shut them down if they aren’t behaving. I hear a little about homelink and have searched Amazon for smart plugs but the info is all a bit daunting. Do I need to buy a special hub of some type? How does it all work? Can I just buy smart plugs that are home link compliant? Admittedly confused here.
Most TVs have parental controls built in - check your tv manual.
To answer your question, Most smart plugs in market don’t need a hub. I currently have a couple of cheap Kasa smart plugs. Just connect to WiFi via the app and create a schedule or manually turn on/off as needed. You can give your partner access to the app or just share the same user password.
With your google WiFi mesh, you probably have the ability to block internet to specific devices on a schedule (that shuts down Youtube access on the TV etc).