That’s essentially what Tonie boxes do. They have internal storage and NFC stickers on the figurines. The box is then caching on the SD card and playing from their based on the ID on the NFC chip. If you take the box offline, it can still play the stuff on the box because of that.
With the very big difference that in my case it never needs to (or can, really) be connected to a network and someone else's service [0]. Only to the "parents' service", which was a more convoluted experience for them. They had to manually transfer the file to the internal memory, link it to the NFC label, and print an appropriate cover art label.
It was also interesting to see that when all the kids were gathering around with their toys they were all gravitating towards the one none of them had. But that was an unintended side effect.
[0] When I first heard of Tonies my mind jumped at the idea that the content is stored on the figurine and somehow wirelessly transmitted to the box. The child, parent, and engineer inside me were all thoroughly disappointed this is not the case, and even more so at the perspective of the service being stopped one day or who knows, monetized more aggressively.
There is one advantage of this though, via the tonie app you can change to separate episodes from the same series without buying additional figures. I'm a network security guy, somehow, and I'm sort of OK with the tonie box. Alexa etc, no way, but it seems not entirely bad.
We have a Yoto player, which works ina similarly (NFC chip as a “pointer into their web service, content cached on the device). I was pleasantly surprised to see that they promise that it’ll will work for at least five years after they stop selling the current version.
> I was pleasantly surprised to see that they promise that it’ll will work for at least five years after they stop selling the current version.
That disclaimer makes me even more uneasy. It implicitly says the toy might stop working after. You bought a toy, you didn't rent it or buy toy-as-a-service. There's no reason the device shouldn't work forever or for as long as it's in good enough condition to operate. And there's no reason you shouldn't own the content on that toy or be free to supply your own forever.
If you buy an audio cassette and a player they work until they fall apart. Here you need to rely on the goodwill of the seller to allow you to keep using them as long as they don't compete with their newer product too much.
I strongly believe that the better option for anyone who can opt for it is something that relies on no online components even if it's more elbow grease for the parents.
To me, a Yoto is a toy-as-a-service. And for what it does, I don't mind. The tradeoffs for what I'm buying are OK to me in this situation.
I'm fully aware the content on these cards will one day go dark. For content I really care about, I'll make sure I purchase that content another way. Often by buying the actual physical book.
But my family doesn't need every children's story book to last forever, we don't need every kids toy to become generational artifacts.
The device has a lot of online "radio" content as well. Those change on a regular basis and once they're gone, they're gone. That's OK to us in the end. We use the app to mess with these boxes as well and listen to the content we bought on cards through the app in the car as well.
If Yoto disappears tomorrow and the boxes fall silent, sure I'll be disappointed. And yes, potentially they could have made them another way. But nobody on the market today makes something as durable, easy to use for a child, and have such a good content library while also making that content 100% offline. The kids are too young to realistically be handling CDs or vinyls. Eventually the kids will age up into handling CDs for listening to content they own, and they already do have some CDs and vinyls but that's currently a "mom and dad handle loading it" situation.
I totally get things like Tonies and Yotos are the embodiment of DRM hellscape. But assuming you go into it eyes open, its an ok trade in my book. Its not like that's the only way to consume media. And in the end, with the license for the media attached to physical cards, its easy to trade/sell/buy the content second hand from friends and other families around. And since its so durable, even though a toddler handled it for a year or two it's still in perfectly fine shape. Have a two year old handle a CD on their own for a year and see how well it holds up.
