New navigation, top 10 list and a very familiar look and feel
Author:
July 18, 2022, 2:00 PM EDT
Compared to Netflix, Disney Plus, and other major streaming services, Prime Video has never been the most elegant or intuitive app. Its user experience lacks the polish of those competitors and feels more composed. There are good aspects to what’s there – like the long-running X-Ray feature that displays cast info and other tidbits whenever the content is paused. But Prime Video hasn’t seen a major overhaul or rethink in years.
This is finally changing today. Starting now and over the next few weeks, Amazon will roll out a new Prime Video experience for Android and connected devices in the living room, including smart TVs, streaming hardware Fire TV, Roku, Apple TV, Android TV and game consoles. Amazon says the experience was designed to be “less busy and overwhelming for our customers.” The result is, frankly, something that looks a lot like Netflix. And maybe that’s for the best.
Prime Video’s main navigation has moved to the left side of the screen and is now a vertical column of icons. These six main areas are Search, Home, Store, Live TV, Free and My Stuff. The Home section has subsections for Movies, TV Shows, and Sports. The store has similar submenus for main channels (aka subscriptions), rentals/purchases, and offers.
There’s now a top 10 list on the home screen so you can easily see what’s popular, and the new Prime Video is much clearer about what entertainment is included in your Prime subscription. These shows and movies are marked with a blue tick in the description, while content that requires a rental or purchase will have a gold shopping bag icon. It’s cleaner than adding a badge to every piece of TV show or movie artwork like Amazon has done before, though it does mean you’ll have to dig a little deeper into the listings to see what’s what.
As you navigate around, you’ll find that many of the carousels keep the same landscape image as before. But Prime Video also introduced so-called “super carousels,” with poster-style portrait art that expands into a video preview when you hover over a selection. Again, stop me if you’ve seen this concept elsewhere.
