If you’re a par­ent, chances are you have to sit through more children’s pro­gram­ming in a week than you ever would in your life if you had the chance. That’s not to say all of it is bad — in fact, some of it is quite good. In Canada, we’re for­tu­nate enough to have a num­ber of excel­lent chan­nels at our dis­posal that com­mit part of their pro­gram­ming to chil­drens tele­vi­sion. With each of these chan­nels being so dif­fer­ent, it’s hard to know which of these is most suit­able for your fam­ily. Luck­ily, we here at Smart­Canucks have the inside track, and we’re going to share it with you in our seven part series “The Best Cana­dian Kids Channels.”

Offer­ing 24 hour a day children’s pro­gram­ming, all aimed at tod­dlers, isn’t an easy task. But Tree­house pulls not only that off, but offers a Video On Demand chan­nel as well! Tree­house On Demand offers a good selec­tion of the station’s most pop­u­lar orig­i­nal and exclu­sive shows (ex. Max & Ruby, Toopy & Binoo, Pocoyo) absolutely free of charge. Both sta­tions offer a healthy mix of pop­u­lar pro­grams (Dora, Diego, The Back­yardi­gans) and orig­i­nal con­tent. Given the 24-hour, always tod­dler safe (and always high qual­ity) nature of Tree­house, it’s gen­er­ally become the default kid’s chan­nel for par­ents of kids under five.

In addi­tion to Tree­house and Tree­house on Demand, a new ser­vice has recently rolled out, Tree­house Direct. Tree­house Direct allows you to stream episodes of cer­tain shows right to your PC. Direct is a lit­tle finicky still because it’s new (for exam­ple, it won’t allow me access as it thinks I’m not from Canada), how­ever I have no doubt that it will evolve into a ser­vice just as depend­able as their On Demand has been.

If you’re not sure if you have Tree­house On Demand, call your cable provider. The Tree­house web­site not only offers sched­ules, con­tests and games — but they also have a fan­tas­tic forum com­mu­nity for par­ents. You can check it out, as well as Tree­house Direct, online at treehousetv.com.

This arti­cle was writ­ten by our very own Jim Squires. To check out more of his writ­ing visit the pop cul­ture blog Fjet­sam, now updated daily.