Amazon announced today that it will rebrand its child-friendly services known as Amazon FreeTime and Amazon FreeTime Unlimited. The services will be renamed to Amazon Kids and Amazon Kids + respectively. In addition to the name change, the services have been redesigned to receive a new home screen, Amazon Echo integrations, and an extensive list of music and videos.
To date, services have provided parents or guardians with a way to use parental controls to restrict their children's access to unauthorized content. In terms of paid subscribers, Amazon offers access to a catalog of more than 20.000 books, movies, audio books and games. These extra paid services cost $ 2,99 per month for a single child or $ 6,99 per month for a family if they are Prime subscribers. These prices go up to $ 4,99 per month and $ 9,99 per month respectively, if you are not a Prime subscriber. Discounts are also available for longer-term commitments, such as the annual family program which costs $ 69 for Prime customers.
Until now, children have had access to FreeTime with their own profile on a tablet Fire or through a special application for Android or iOS devices. This will change as in the future, Amazon Kids + subscription will continue to work on a number of platforms, including Tablets Fire, Fire TV, Kindle, Echo, iOS, Chrome OS and devices Android.
With the update, the Amazon Kids experience for Fire tablets has been redesigned to look more like an "adult" tablet, through a new profile selection.
Amazon Kids will organize its various sections with the categories "Educational", "Applications and games", "Music"," Videos "and" Books "which will stand out with various colorful icons. Below it will have various other topics units or sentences such as a category with the "top brands", one with the content that the child saw recently or a category with the suggested toys, for example.
Amazon says this profile is best for kids ages 8 and up, as it serves as a transition stage that will help children adapt to adult tablet use. Parents can also select the "Adjust Age Filters and Themes" section in the so-called Amazon Parent Dashboard.
Another news feature brings Alexa voice assistant to Amazon Kids. If children have an Alexa device in their home, such as a smart speaker Echo, can use their tablet to transmit one voice message inside the house through the "announce" function of the device. Because this feature means that Amazon listens to and processes the child's voice, parental consent is required.
The rebranding is noteworthy as it represents another company that adopts the "plus" (+) symbol to indicate that a service offers additional premium subscription content. We have already seen that many streaming services use the same kind of brand as Disney +, ESPN +, TiVo + and Apple TV +, for example.
Amazon says the full rebranding will be released in the coming months, but the new home screen and Alexa integration will be available in the coming weeks.
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