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Amazon Prime Video gets a makeover
With new navigation, a top 10 list, and a very familiar look and feel, the new Prime Video will be less cluttered.
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 “less busy and overwhelming for our customers.” The result, frankly, is something that looks a whole 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 will have sub-sections for movies, TV shows, and sports. And the Store has similar sub-menus for Prime Channels (aka subscriptions), rentals / purchases, and deals.
There’s now a Top 10 list on the home screen for users easy reference about 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 designated with a blue checkmark in the description, whereas content that requires a rental or purchase will have a gold shopping bag icon.
The redesign of Prime Video took 18-months to complete . The experience has been overseen by Ben Smith, who is now Amazon’s VP of product for Prime Video and Prime Studios and he also led Hulu’s radical redesign in 2017.
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. Amazon is will also push subscriptions for third-party content onto customers, such as the latest being added were a few of HBO originals. 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, won’t be updated. In cases where devices don’t get the new version, they’ll stick with what they’ve got currently and will continue to provide access to Prime Video into the future.