Amazon’s got a big fall season coming up, so the Prime Video app is getting overhauled ahead of time.
The company formerly run by Jeff Bezos announced Monday that its streaming service would get a new user interface after years of looking the same. The update will start rolling out to streaming devices like Amazon’s own Fire TV line this week, with a vague “summer” promise for when everyone can expect to have it. Screenshots don’t entirely do it justice, so Amazon also released a short video explaining all the changes.
It looks like content is still sorted into horizontal rows with large, rectangular images promoting each show or movie, but how you access all of that has changed somewhat. There are now six primary tabs, each accessible through a new sidebar menu rather than arranged horizontally along the top of the screen like before: Home, Store, Find, Live TV, Free With Ads, and My Stuff. Content that comes free with a Prime Video subscription (or presumably any attached subscriptions, like Paramount+) is marked with a blue checkmark, while anything you’d need to rent or buy has a shopping bag icon now.
The “Home” screen has easy access to other subscriptions, as well as a new “Continue Watching” row that shows not only what you’ve been watching, but how far into it you got before stopping last time. A new Top 10 section shows what’s been popular lately, in case you don’t want to miss out on any zeitgeists. In addition to all that, there’s a new “Sports” sub-menu here that gives you access to any live sports your various subscriptions offer. Given Amazon’s upcoming debut of exclusive weekly NFL games through Prime Video, this is going to be an important page for millions of customers to know about.
The Live TV section looks like it’ll pull in live programming from services like Paramount+.
Credit: Amazon
Generally, it’s all a bit sleeker and cleaner, though the tiles are very large, and the update looks to still heavily promote Amazon originals over anything else. This update was really only a matter of time after Amazon overhauled its whole Fire TV UI in 2020 with a new experience that looks very similar to the new Prime Video app.
Let’s just hope the streaming quality on those NFL streams lives up to the slick new UI you’ll use to watch them.
