Toniebox: radio plays now also available without a figure

You can now secure new content for the Toniebox without additional firgur.

HIt is hard to imagine children’s rooms without audio games. For some years now, special WLAN speakers have been providing little story fans with new adventures. Probably the best known model of this type is the Toniebox. The approach is clever: radio plays are tied to small plastic figures, so-called Tonies, with an integrated NFC chip. If you want to download and play a story, you need the right Tonie, which you have to put on the box. Children love the concept, after all, there is a new toy for the collection shelf with every radio play. Parents, on the other hand, are regularly annoyed by the sometimes astronomical prices of the figures and the need to carry a whole sack of plastic dolls with you on every trip. On top of that, the masses of figures cause unnecessary plastic waste. Now the manufacturer Boxine is bowing to the criticism and lifting the figure binding a little.

Like the company recently announced, new radio plays can now also be purchased as a pure download and linked to an existing character. The purchase is made via the Meine-tonies.de customer portal. The price per episode varies and starts at around 6 euros. For the time being, the offer is limited to new episodes of the series “Benjamin Blümchen”, “Bibi Blocksberg” and “Bibi & Tina”, further series are to follow shortly. But the option does not come without a catch. First of all, the download episodes can only be linked to one character in the respective series of radio plays. If you want to buy new “Benjamin Blümchen” episodes, you need at least one copy of the plastic elephant. In addition, the consequences (as is often the case with digital content) are tied to the respective user account and thus to a Toniebox. Unlike conventional Tonies, it is not possible to resell or rent the digitally acquired episodes.