Amazon Adds New Parental Controls to Fire Tablets
Amazon’s Fire Tablets now make it easier for parents to keep tabs on their kids’ media consumption: The company added a parental control dashboard to its FreeTime Unlimited subscription service Wednesday, providing daily activity reports for each child.
Amazon has long offered FreeTime Unlimited as a way to provide a more curated media experience for kids, giving parents unlimited access to a selection of age-appropriate e-books, movies, games and more. Altogether, Freetime Unlimited is offering some 13,000 titles for $5 per month, or $3 per month for Prime members, with additional costs for families with one child.
The newly-launched dashboard now allows parents to access a detailed daily report on their child’s media habit on the web, showing exactly how much time they spent on each media category on any given day, and even telling them how many minutes they were reading an individual book.
The dashboard also offers insights about the topics of each title, and even suggests questions parents can ask to start a conversation about a book and the lessons it provides. Amazon’s editorial team has been writing thousands of such summary and discussion point cards, and the company says it will add new ones every day.
Amazon has long invested in kids-friendly products and content, and is even selling a special rugged version of its Fire tablet designed for younger audiences. In addition, the company has also been spending heavily on kids original content, securing exclusive streaming rights to shows from PBS Kids and even commissioning exclusives like “Ronja the Robber’s Daughter.”
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