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If you find yourself hunting for The Boys harder than Homelander, Amazon is about to convert your frown into a smile, much like its logo. The Prime Video app is getting a major makeover for the AI-age and we travelled to the Amazon-MGM Studios in Culver City, California to get a sneak peek into the new UI. Set to roll out in a phased manner to all its global users starting today, the refreshed Prime Video app has been designed and optimised for all sorts of mobile and living room devices, so the experience of the new features should largely be consistent regardless of your consumption device. Seamless navigation and easier searchability were the tentpoles of this design overhaul.
The Amazon Prime Video app gets a dose of AI
Streaming’s about to get easier!
Kam Keshmiri - Vice President of Design at Prime Video
"We’re always listening to customers and reviewing feedback, and it's clear that many are in search of a more intuitive streaming experience. With the improvements we have made to the user experience, customers will be presented with an easy-to-navigate entertainment destination where they can discover new titles and enjoy favorites, as well as sign-up to or switch add-on subscriptions with just a few clicks. Best of all, they can do this while using a single login."
Look and feel
The big changes are both, under the hood and also in your face. There is an obvious focus on beautification of the artwork, starting with the hero rotator that offers single-click access to the content. On a living room device, video content will start playing automatically in this rotator, giving you a quick glance into the material. Using LLMs, the synopses of the content will not be truncated like earlier but rather formatted to fit the preview screen. The top of the screen will always be anchored by the new Navigation bar that has been redesigned to include tabs for Movies, TV Shows, Live TV and a dedicated tab for Prime that will house all of the content included with your Prime membership. Third-party content partners will also get their logos in this navigation bar if they’ve been subscribed to, making it easy to find your preferred channels.
Subscribe for more options
Regardless of the included content with Prime membership or available subscriptions, the new UI is more elegantly divided between the paid and non-paid content. A golden shopping basket always denoting an additional step. A growing business for Amazon, Prime Video’s video marketplace offers customers programming from partners such as Lionsgate Play, Discovery+ Crunchyroll, BBC Player, Sony Pictures – Stream, MGM+, FanCode, Chaupal, Manorama Max, Eros Now, Hoichoi, Anime Times to name a few, via Prime Video Channels add-on-subscriptions. An option to rent movies, regardless of whether customers have a Prime membership or not is a convenient one too.
Subscriptions get a lot easier too with all of them being grouped under a dedicated tab on the Navigation bar, away from all the free content under the Prime tab. Deals for third-party services will also be displayed under this tab along with a bunch of recommended options to subscribe to, based on your viewing history, past rentals and preferences. How will it pan out on every device, mobile or living room? We did probe into that as well…
Adam Gray - VP of Product at Prime Video
"I'll say we’re hyper focused on making the transaction experience as seamless as possible. There are a lot of specific nuances to India, things like the 2-factor authentication and the way it’s approached. That adds some complexity. We’re doing a lot to try and change that and we’re doing it device by device. So often there are device specific challenges so we also work with our partners to move through those challenges. We just launched something called explicit language of preference. So if you choose a certain language for the UI then that’s also the one we lean into for localisation of content. But Its not true for a lot of customers in India as they will choose English or any of the other multiple options. It basically enables customers to select languages that they would like to stream in and change their experience. We’re doing more and more to implicitly figure that out as well. But just giving the ability for customers to directly change that had a really big impact. India is one where we have a dedicated team that just works on that experience because there are so many options."
Refined user experience
Partners can also use AWS (Amazon Web Services) to optimise the visuals for the hero content on the carousel. Elsewhere in the app, the use of Generative AI is prevalent in the recommendations that will be offered on the home page. Using Amazon Bedrock to power this new era of even more relevant and personalised suggestions, the app is going to look and feel new, thanks also in part to the new animations, smoother page transitions and zoom effects. The experience is said to have been optmised even for older devices so it should be lag-free and device agnostic.
Home-theatre friendly
Some of these hardware specific features have already been silently rolling out over the past few weeks. Videophile-centric features such as HDR 10+ for increased dynamic range and studio-grade colours, AI Super Resolution for upscaling lower-res video to 4K quality without lag and the Prime Video Calibrated mode for Sony TVs which we are currently reviewing in the new Bravia 7 mini-LED TV at the Stuff HQ. But the real treat for the majority of consumers watching Prime Video on their laptops, tablets, mobile phones or TVs with no soundbar augmentation will be the addition of Dialog Boost. It enhances vocal clarity relative to background effects and will be available in Medium and High settings. Once again, it uses multiple AI models to identify and separate speech from effects and is contextual to every scene.It will be content specific though and during launch, it will be available across thousands of titles with more that will be added on a continuous basis.
Although at first it may not seem all that different in its colour schemes and overall aesthetic, using it for a few minutes highlights its renewed sense of elegance in navigation and smoothness in operation. The all-new app shall start rolling out across regions and device categories starting today and if you can’t see it after multiple refreshes, be gentle on your digits and devices and try updating them manually if possible. Or wait it out for a few days. Good things are coming!