Amazon Prime Video is full of great shows and movies, but the way you navigate its library has always felt clunky compared to competitors like Netflix.
With a mixture of paid-for purchases and rentals, individual subscription channels and the content available with an Amazon Prime account, it’s sometimes difficult to track down exactly what you’re looking for, or to see at a glance what you can watch at no extra cost as a Prime subscriber. But this should be set to improve, with Amazon Studio head Jen Salke revealing that a new Prime Video interface is in the works.
Speaking at a presentation at the company’s Television Critics Association press tour, Salke said she had seen “a prototype phone that showed [her] the interface that [Amazon is] working on that’s about to be – that’s in the middle of being developed and coming soon”.
Before you get your hopes up about the prospect of a new Amazon phone on the basis of the above quote, Slake has since clarified that she was solely referring to the prototype phone UI.
More changes coming
While Salke says her team hasn’t “felt an urgency to put a deadline on [the interface’s release]”, she described it as being more intuitive for the user than previous efforts.
What may come as a frustration to some viewers however is the news that, for the time being at least, Amazon is only talking about updating the platform’s mobile app interface – the big-screen TV version was not mentioned, but it could equally do with a refresh.
It’s not the only change coming to the Prime Video service. The company will no longer be picking up entire seasons of its pilot shows via a user poll, but will instead use its own metrics and user data to make a decision.
It’s not an unusual decision – many Hollywood studios now favor picking up an entire season at once based on writer’s room output, as viewers become impatient for a full series to launch following an initial pilot release.
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