The new Prime Video experience starts rolling out this week. | Image: Amazon
New navigation, a top 10 list, and a very familiar look and feel
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 cobbled together. There are good aspects to whatâs there â like the long-standing X-Ray feature that shows cast information and other trivia facts whenever content is paused. But Prime Video hasnât received a significant overhaul or rethinking in many years.
At long last, that changes today. Starting now and continuing over the next couple weeks, Amazon will roll out 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 has been designed to be âless busy and overwhelming for our customers.â The result, frankly, is something that looks a whole lot like Netflix. And maybe thatâs for the best.
Images: Amazon / Netflix, GIF: Chris Welch / The Verge
Every streaming app looks the same now.
Prime Videoâs 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 sub-sections for movies, TV shows, and sports. And the Store has similar sub-menus for Prime Channels (aka subscriptions), rentals / purchases, and deals.
Thereâs now a Top 10 list on the home screen so you can easily reference whatâs popular, and the new Prime Video is much clearer about what entertainment is included with your Prime subscription. These shows and movies are designated with a blue checkmark in the description, whereas content that requires a rental or purchase will have a gold shopping bag icon. Thatâs cleaner than adding a badge onto every piece of TV show or movie artwork like Amazon was doing before, though it does mean youâll have to dig into listings a bit to see whatâs what.
Image: Amazon
The new Prime Video is meant to feel less cluttered.
Image: Amazon
Itâs easier to tell which content comes with your Amazon Prime subscription.
As you navigate around, youâll find that many of the carousels retain the same landscape artwork as before. But Prime Video has also introduced what it calls âsuper carousels,â with portrait, poster-style art that expands into a video preview when you hover over a selection. Again, stop me if youâve seen this concept elsewhere.
The redesign of Prime Video has been an 18-month project. As itâs gotten closer to the finish line, the new experience has been overseen by Ben Smith, who is now Amazonâs VP of product for Prime Video and Prime Studios. Smith is the same executive who led Huluâs radical redesign in 2017. In hindsight, Hulu tried to reinvent the user interface and pushed too far in a new direction. Customers were quick to voice their grievances, and the company spent many months reining in some of the changes and returning to what was familiar.
By comparison, Prime Videoâs redesign is deliberate, calculated, and â as the parallels with Netflix, HBO Max, and Disney Plus demonstrate â far less audacious. Amazon did extensive usability testing and user research, finding that people generally took to the changes very quickly. Considering the growing resemblance between all of these apps, thatâs not very surprising.
Image: Amazon
Sports get a bigger spotlight in the new Prime Video.
Image: Amazon
The Live TV section highlights live events from Prime and linear programming from Paramount Plus and other subscriptions.
In some cases, the goal was to better highlight Prime Videoâs underutilized perks. The new, dedicated Live TV hub provides a guide that aggregates linear programming from channel subscriptions like AMC Plus and Paramount Plus, plus Prime-exclusive live sporting events and ad-supported content thatâs free for everyone. This interface is already available on the web but will likely be used much more widely now that itâs getting so much exposure in the Prime Video app. âIn usability testing, we repeatedly heard the phrase, âwow, I didnât even know Prime Video had live TV,ââ said product director Helena Cerna during a recent press preview.
Prime Video has a new coat of paint and layout, but popular features like multi-user profiles, X-Ray, and Alexa integration are still present. Just as before, youâll see quite a bit of promoted content, and Amazon is still trying to push subscriptions for third-party content onto customers â just as rumors swirl about HBO potentially returning to the fray.
Some annoyances have also stuck around: Prime Video still presents TV seasons in odd ways (episode 0: trailer, anyone?) and can sometimes separate 4K and HD versions of the same movie. Some of these head-scratching organization choices are due to the fact that Amazon still sells a lot of this content, whereas competitors only have to worry about letting you stream it.
Image: Amazon
Prime Channels (subscriptions) are a point of focus in the new experience.
After this initial phase of the rollout, the new Prime Video design will come to iOS and the web in the coming months. However, not all hardware will be able to run the redesigned experience. The PlayStation 3 and third-generation Apple TV from 2012, for example, wonât be updated. In cases where devices donât get the new version, theyâll stick with what theyâve got currently and will continue to provide access to Prime Video into the future
The next several weeks will prove to be a good test for the new Prime experience, with The Lord of The Rings: The Rings of Power and NFL Thursday Night Football both premiering in September. Amazon plans to continue iterating on the new design based on customer feedback.