Along with today’s announcement of the rebranding of Amazon FreeTime into Amazon Kids, Amazon has revealed that a new home screen option will be coming to Fire tablets. The new home screen will be an alternative to the current kid-friendly FreeTime experience available for child profiles. The new interface is meant to be closer to a more traditional tablet for children ages 8 and up. Read more ›
Amazon has announced that they are rebranding their kid-friendly service formerly known as Amazon FreeTime into Amazon Kids. The paid subscrition service formerly known as Amazon FreeTime Unlimited will now be adopting the “+” symbol that many streaming services are using and be known as Amazon Kids+. Read more ›
Get this Headphone + FreeTime Deal
Here is a great deal for those of you with kids. Amazon is offering a 3 Month FreeTime Unlimited subscription for $2.99 that also comes with Free Disney Kids Headphones. At a regular price of $29.99, the 3 month FreeTime Unlimited subscription is a good deal on its own, but the Disney headphones, which retail for $20-$25, make it the best deal I’ve ever seen for FreeTime. To get this deal, just add the $2.99 offer to your cart and checkout. There will be a message (on a desktop browser at least) at the top of the checkout page telling you that you qualify for the free headphones. Finish checking out and then you’ll be able to go back and purchase one of these 3 Disney Kids Headphones with a discount at checkout that makes the headphone free. These headphones have a 3 level switch that lets you set a volume limit so that your little one doesn’t hurt their hearing. This deal is actually worth it for the headphones alone. FreeTime Unlimited, which provides access to hundreds of kid-friendly games, educational apps, movies, shows, and books, is almost just an extra perk.
In conjunction with the release of the Echo Dot Kids Edition, Amazon is bringing FreeTime to existing Echo, Echo Dot, and Echo Plus devices. FreeTime is what Amazon calls their advanced parental control options and family-focused features found on their hardware devices, like Fire tablets and Kindle ebook readers. A paid subscription called FreeTime Unlimited will also be available, which primarily adds access to kid-friendly content, but FreeTime features are free for all. Read more ›
Amazon has updated their Parent Dashbord to now allow parents to remotely update the parental controls of their kid’s devices. Previously, if you wanted to update the FreeTime settings of something like a Fire Kids Edition tablet, you had to do it on the tablet itself. Now parents can use any browser to adjust things like screen time limits, set a bedtime, whitelist apps, enable/disable the browser, modify educational goals and more. Ever since its launch last year, the Parents Dashboard has given parents insight into the apps, games, videos, and ebooks that their kids use most. Now it will also let parents immediately act on those stats and adjust parental controls accordingly from the same interface.
Amazon FreeTime Unlimited is a collection of thousands of kid-friendly TV shows, movies, books, and apps. It’s a subscription service that costs $4.99 per child ($2.99 for Prime members), or $9.99 for a family of up to 4 children ($6.99 for Prime members). Since its launch in 2012, the service has only been available through Kindle and Fire devices, but Amazon has just released a FreeTime app in the Google Play Store, making the service available outside of Amazon’s own hardware for the first time. Read more ›
Amazon FreeTime, both the free and paid version, is a great feature of the Fire TV and Fire tablets that allows parents to give their kids access to curated movies, shows, games, and websites, without worrying about them being exposed to adult themed content. Amazon has moderators who have approved content for kids, including over 8,000 books and 40,000 white-listed webpages.
Today, Amazon has introduced a Parent Dashboard for FreeTime that allows parents to see exactly how their kids are spending their time while on Fire devices. The dashboard also includes what Amazon is calling “Discussion Cards” that give parents a summary of the content their kids have interacted with, to make conversations about books, shows, and games easier. Read more ›
Amazon has announced that they’ve expanding their FreeTime Unlimited library to include 3,000 new titles appropriate for children between the ages of 9 to 12 years old. Previously, the library of kid friendly videos, books, apps, and games, which now totals 13,000 titles, was primarily focused on 3 to 8 year olds. Subscribers with Fire TVs will now be able to watch shows like iCarly, Design Squad, and Big Time Rush. FreeTime Unlimited is Amazon’s kid-friendly subscription service that offers curated content for $2.99 per month, if you’re a Prime member, or $4.99 per month if you’re not.
Oceanhouse Media, top digital book app publisher, has begun releasing their immense catalog of interactive children’s books on the Amazon Fire TV. So far they’ve released 15 book apps with many more expected to come in the next few days. Included are classic favorites like Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat and dinosaur books from the Smithsonian like It’s Tyrannosaurus Rex! Also released are several Berenstain Bears and Little Critter book apps. These apps and many more are included for free with Amazon’s child focused subscription service, FreeTime Unlimited. Oceanhouse’s book apps range into the hundreds, so expect to see a steady stream of them in the weekly new app recap posts for weeks to come.
The Fire TV Stick released later this week will not have access to FreeTime, Amazon’s granular parental control options available on the Fire TV. FreeTime allows parents to create individual profiles for each child and control precisely which apps and videos the child may use. The feature also grants access to Amazon’s curated subscription service of kid-safe content, FreeTime Unlimited. It was understandable that international Fire TVs exclude FreeTime due to content licensing issues, but it’s surprising the feature is excluded from the US-only Fire TV Stick.
The Fire TV Stick does have basic parental controls which can prevent access to Games & Apps, Photos, and Music as a whole. However it lacks the granular features of FreeTime which can control access down to individual apps and videos. I’ve reached out to Amazon asking if a future update will bring FreeTime to the Fire TV Stick but have received no response.
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