Amazon Fire TV users will begin to notice a major shift in their streaming players next month as Amazon launches its biggest interface makeover in more than four years.
The new Fire TV experience has been available on Amazon’s third-generation Fire TV Stick and Fire TV Stick Lite since December, but Sandeep Gupta, Amazon’s VP and GM for Fire TV, said in an interview that more devices will begin receiving the update at March . This includes the Fire TV Stick 4K, the first and second generation Fire TV Cube and the pendant-shaped Fire TV.
With the update, Amazon is trying to simplify its once chaotic menu system with fewer redundant sections and easier ways to browse content. The new interface also adds support for the user profile throughout the system, so that each family member can have their own personalized home screen.
“It’s a big change in the navigation model, in discovery and everything, and we wanted to make sure that customers understood, understood and liked where it was going before implementing it for everyone,” said Gupta.
It is certainly an improvement over the previous interface, but as I discovered using it, it also preserves some of Fire TV’s old frustrations.
See what’s being broadcast
With the new interface, Amazon tried to control part of the expansion that made Fire TV devices difficult to navigate. While Fire TV devices used to have separate top-level menus for content, movies, TV shows and free apps, the new interface consolidates all of these sections into one menu, called “Find”.
Jared Newman / IDGWith the “Find” section, Amazon reduced four menus to a single hub to find things to watch.
This leaves only four main areas for navigation, including the Home section, the Library for video purchases and watchlist items, a Live section for linear video streams and Find.
At the same time, Amazon found more places to study recommendations. Your six favorite apps are now next to Fire TV’s top-level menus, each of which can suggest movies and shows to watch when you roll them. The Find menu mentioned above also has new genre-based categories, such as Drama, Westerns and Comedy Films.
Jared Newman / IDGHighlighting one of your pinned apps reveals a “peek” at some of its content. Amazon says it is a popular feature in the new interface.
Perhaps because of all these changes, users who have already received the update are twice as likely to venture beyond the main home screen and elsewhere in the interface, said Gupta.
“Frankly, many [the old interface] it wasn’t working for them and it became obsolete and repetitive, and they were unable to discover and find new content, ”he said. “That’s when we spent a lot of time trying to improve the experience.”
Room for improvement
This is not to say that the new interface is a total triumph.
Like some of its competitors (most notably Google and its new Chromecast), Amazon is trying to solve the problem of having too many streaming apps to rate. To that end, Fire TV’s content recommendations come from many different sources, including Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hulu, Disney + and CBS All Access.
But since Amazon doesn’t always specify where a recommendation comes from until you click on it, you can’t easily tell whether that selection will require another subscription or rental fee. Unlike the aforementioned Chromecast or TiVo Stream 4K, there’s no way to limit the Fire TV home screen to just the content you’re already paying for.
Jared Newman / IDGWith profile support, Amazon can ensure that everyone receives their own set of recommendations.
Gupta said the home screen is structured in this way by design, as Amazon wants people to discover things in new services. Still, he says Amazon is working on ways to make those recommendations more relevant. For example, the company has just launched a “Dynamic Row” feature that organizes its home screen based on its viewing habits.
“When there is a recommendation that is not relevant, it looks like an ad, while the relevant recommendations look like a useful discovery mechanism,” he said.
Technically, there is a way to filter content at extra cost: within the Movies and TV Shows sections of the Find menu, you can activate a “Free for me” filter that shows only the content of your subscriptions or programming with ads. And if you browse by genre, you’ll usually see a line of recommendations from your subscription services only.
Jared Newman / IDGAmazon’s “Free for me” filter is a way to avoid upsold on new services, but it seems incomplete.
But even these features are imperfect. I found that they weigh a lot on Netflix and Amazon Prime, to the exclusion of other services I subscribe to, including Disney +, CBS All Access and Apple TV +.
Towards a better streaming guide
These questions refer to a larger problem with Fire TV in general, a problem that is not unique to the new interface: it may still seem more like a marketing exercise than an attempt to serve users.
The home screen continues to have banner ads and sponsored content lines, which you must scroll through to reach the recommendations below, and Amazon Prime content and Amazon’s advertising TV service seem to get more promotion than anything else. . While other streaming platforms, such as Roku and Google TV, have their own ads and promotions, Amazon’s approach seems more aggressive.
Jared Newman / IDGBanner ads: still one of the worst features of Fire TV.
But perhaps that will start to change as streaming services begin to fight for better positioning. At some level, the amount of Prime content on the Fire TV home screen looks like a remnant of when most other apps weren’t interested in this type of aggregation. Traditionally, services like Netflix have been more intent on attracting people to their own apps than advertising content outside of them.
Gupta said that these services are finally coming, however. He noted that Hulu + Live TV saw a 50 percent increase in traffic when it added channels to the “Live” section of Fire TV, and said that streaming services are starting to see unified guides as a necessity for engagement. With any luck, the Fire TV experience will become more balanced as streaming providers insist on showing their content.
“You see more and more streaming services, more and more apps being launched, so where do people go to discover and find new content? That’s where we spend a lot of time to improve the experience, ”said Gupta.
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