New navigation, the top 10 list and a very familiar look and feel
From
July 18, 2022, 2:00 p.m. 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 polished. There are good aspects to what’s there – like the long-lasting X-Ray feature that shows cast information and other trivia when content is paused. But Prime Video hasn’t received a significant overhaul or rethink for many years.
Finally, that is changing today. Starting now and continuing over the next two weeks, Amazon will launch a new Prime Video experience for Android and connected living room devices, including smart TVs, Fire TV streaming hardware, 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, frankly, is something that looks a lot like Netflix. And maybe that’s for the best.
Prime Video’s main navigation has been shifted to the left side of the screen and is now a vertical column of icons. Those six main areas are Search, Home, Store, Live TV, Free and My Stuff. The Home section has subsections for movies, TV shows and sports. And the Store has similar sub-menus for Prime Channels (aka subscriptions), rentals / purchases and offers.
There’s now a Top 10 list on the home screen so you can easily reference what’s popular, and the new Prime Video is much clearer about what entertainment is included with your Prime subscription. These shows and movies are indicated by a blue tick in the description, while content that requires a rental or purchase will have a gold shopping icon. That’s cleaner than adding a badge to every piece of TV show or movie artwork, as Amazon has done before, though it does mean you’ll have to dig through listings a bit to see what’s what.
As you navigate around, you will find that many of the carousels retain the same scenic artwork as before. But Prime Video has also introduced what it calls “supercarousels,” with portrait, poster-style art that expands into a video preview when you hover over a selection. Again, stop me if you’ve seen this concept elsewhere.
