Amazon has unveiled a great new subscription service for kids and parents alike known as Kindle FreeTime Unlimited. The service, which builds on top of the existing Kindle FreeTime feature found on the company’s latest devices, is designed to provide children with an unlimited all-they-can-eat selection of age-appropriate movies, books, and games while giving parents peace of mind.
To facilitate this goal, the Seattle-based online retailer partnered with the biggest names in children’s media, including Andrews McMeel Publishing, Chronicle Books, DC Comics, Disney, HIT Entertainment, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, Marvel, Nickelodeon, PBS, Reading Rainbow, Sesame Workshop and more. This means kids will have access to top brands like Sesame Street, Barney, Dora the Explorer, Scooby-Doo, Sponge Bob, and Cailou, as well as games like Cut the Rope, Fruit Ninja Puss N’ Boots, and Where’s My Water? And that’s just a small slice of what’s available.
Since each child can have his or her own profile, Amazon is able to tailor content based on age and gender, as well as provide recommendations for kid-friendly topics and brands. The company has also gone to the effort of stripping out potentially troublesome things like in-app payments, ads, and social media. In the future, parents will be able to block certain types of content as well. Finally, Amazon brought on Common Sense Media to help with the curation of content. The end result is a service that allows parents to safely hand their children a Kindle with a virtually unlimited amount of kid-friendly content.
Of course, if you want to use FreeTime Unlimited, you’ll need either the $159 Kindle Fire, the $199 Kindle Fire HD, or the $299 Kindle Fire HD 8.9-inch. You’ll also need an Amazon Prime subscription to take advantage of the discounted pricing, which comes out to $2.99/mo per child or $6.99/mo for the whole family. Without a Prime subscription, it’ll run you $4.99/mo or $9.99/mo, respectively. Kindle FreeTime Unlimited will be released “in the coming weeks” via an OTA software update.
