Same videos they love.
But no rewind. No forward. Just a video, played from start to finish.

My son is 16 now. When he was 11 months old, he picked up a phone at a family party and everyone gasped at how fast his little fingers moved across the screen. They wowed. We all did. Fifteen years later, people still say it. But it doesn't feel the same anymore.

He is on the autism spectrum. And somewhere along the way, YouTube became something more than entertainment. The rewind button — that tiny, innocent slider — became a loop he couldn't escape. The same one second, over and over. Not watching. Stimming. For hours. And if I didn't intervene — who knows. Maybe all day.

I want to be careful here. I know stimming serves a purpose. I know he can't simply choose to stop. I'm not angry at him — I never was. But I've spent fifteen years watching those fast fingers pull him further from the world around him. And I've wondered, quietly and constantly: what if he'd never been introduced to it?

About seven or eight years ago, so frustrated I couldn't sleep, I tried to build this app myself. I failed. I'm not a developer. Around the same time I watched a video of Sundar Pichai — the CEO of Google — talking about accountability. About how Google was taking responsibility in the world. And I thought: someone should tell him about this.

But then I thought about what it's actually like to be a parent of a child with profound autism. You are not writing emails to CEOs. You are surviving. Every single day is triage — therapies, schools, meltdowns, paperwork, fighting for services that should just exist. The small things never make it to the top of the list. And this — a rewind button, a stimming behaviour, a screen habit — probably sounds small to anyone who hasn't lived it.

It isn't small. But I understand why it was never considered. Parents like us are too exhausted to advocate for the things that seem invisible. And large companies never had to look closely enough to see it. We have always been invisible — in waiting rooms, in school meetings, in policy decisions, in product roadmaps. In so many facets of life, we are the afterthought. If we are thought of at all.

That email is still sitting in my drafts folder. Last night, with the help of AI, I finally built what I couldn't build alone. BloomPlayer is that email to Sundar, finally sent. Just not to him.

It's not a cure. It's not therapy. It's a small tool — a player that simply removes the controls. No rewind. No skip. No progress bar. Just the video, playing forward. For every child diagnosed today, tomorrow, next year — before the habit forms. Before they know there's anything else.