Amazon Overhauls Prime Video Interface, Balancing Complex And Simple

Is there anything in streaming TV (not to mention the Smart TVs that feature those services) that is both more important and gets less attention from customers than the actual user interface? Probably not.

But in an increasingly competitive and churn-filled streaming sector, it’s probably becoming a differentiator, second to having really good shows when people want to watch them. Most challenging is the process of both making access simple/easy while also connecting people quickly to the billions of dollars worth of shows the service offers.

Customers don’t want to be overwhelmed with busy, kludgy, or non-responsive interfaces. But they also want to find the shows they want, and to be able to stumble across ones they’re most likely to like.

That’s a big reason AmazonAMZN
unveiled a significant revamp of its Prime Video interface this week that looks, well, a bit more like NetflixNFLX
.

And Amazon Prime isn’t the only streaming service getting a Hollywood facelift, as Pluto announced its own changes late last week.

Other services are making tweaks, but clearly have some work to do. For all its great shows and deep library, HBO Max is routinely criticized for a buggy and problematic interface that can make it difficult to access all the great content.

Worse news for customers, parent company Warner Bros. DiscoveryWBD
merger plans to eventually mash Discovery Plus together with HBO Max (and the result probably renamed). But that merger of differing audiences, interfaces, and supporting technology will only delay and complicate a definitive update there, especially as the recently merged company continues to slash spending and integrate various divisions.

Even OG streaming service Hulu has been manifesting (on my screens anyway) a weird glitch when it cuts away to ads from, in this case, showing summer’s biggest hit The Bear. Instead of going directly to the ad, the interface goes to a black screen, with closed-caption dialog from the show for several seconds, before switching to the ads.

The glitch is confusing and off-putting, but at least doesn’t appear to clip out any of the actual show after the ads are finished playing. That a streaming service that’s been operating since 2007 still has issues like this suggests these are not simple things to fix.

To be fair, taking a (web) page from the market leader, as Amazon is doing, isn’t a bad idea. It’s even a time-honored tradition among tech firms, which have been borrowing mercilessly from each other for decades (see also, Microsoft-AppleAAPL
, Facebook/Instagram-Snapchat, etc).

There’s a lot to like with what Amazon is now rolling out, first on its Fire devices, the Android TV platform and some other living room devices, said Helena Cerna, Prime Video’s Global Director, Product in a briefing. The redesign will hit iOS devices and the web later, part of a global rollout affecting thousands of kinds of devices.

The company is enlisting “more visually evocative visuals,” and adding access to the trailer for highlighted show. It’s also reducing the visual “busy-ness” at the top of the page.

In part that’s being done by moving a set of navigation controls from the top of the page to the left side, with a stack of icons for quick access to “my stuff,” free content, a store for all the available movies and series that aren’t free, the home page, and notably, live TV. Another sidebar across the bottom includes links to movies, TV shows and sports.

“In recent years, Amazon has really been investing in lots of different content,” Cerna said. “We were really focused in making sure customers had an easy ingress to understand what’s coming now.”

If you own the content being displayed, whether it’s from Prime, another video subscription or service, or something acquired in the store, the service will show a blue checkmark. And if you need to spend more to watch, that will feature a yellow shopping cart icon instead, with links to subscribe, rent of buy.

Amazon will also spotlight the substantial amount of free content it offers through more than 200 live linear channels on its separate FreeVee service and on Prime for many genres, services such as AMC, and popular franchises such as The Walking Dead.

“We really focused on making sure customers could understand how they would consume that content, live and linear, on demand, and whether they would need to purchase,” Cerna said. “Those were the main areas we focused on. We certainly, as we get more live, linear and sports content, you can see we wanted to surface that content.”

“In usability testing, we repeatedly heard, ‘Wow, I didn’t even know Prime had live TV,” Cerna said.

Given the increasing shift by many viewers to low-intensity, ad-supported viewing on services such as Pluto, Tubi, STIRR, and similar outlets, trying to highlight that content, and give people a reason to stay on the Prime platform makes a lot of sense.

As LightShed Partners pointed out in a research note on Monday, all the streaming services need to focus on optimizing for time spent, especially as advertising becomes increasingly important to future profitability.

‘The importance of time spent becomes the critical driver of revenue when you are trying to sell advertising,” wrote LightShed analysts Rich Greenfield, Brandon Ross and Mark Kelley. “Time spent creates inventory (impressions) that can be monetized. In the connected TV world, Netflix and YouTube dominate time spent and are actually strengthening their lead relative to peers.”

That live TV spotlight will only grow in importance for Amazon this fall, when Prime Video takes over ‘casts of the NFL’s Thursday night game, long one of the most-watched shows on broadcast TV. The company is spotlighting other sports better in the interface too, Cerna said.

Paramount Global-owned Pluto.tv, the ad-supported service with 68 million viewers globally, also just reorganized its interface in the United States, adding five categories and four channels and shows to its offering, along with new shows.

Among the new categories are popular genres such as “Game Shows,” “Daytime TV” and “Lifestyle & Culture.” The service also is adding channels devoted to durable syndicated powerhouses Let’s Make a Deal, Judge Judy, Jeopardy!, and Wheel of Fortune.

“We are always looking for ways to improve our programming offering and make it easier for the audience to find what they are looking for,” Pluto TV SVP of programming Scott Reich said in a release. “Not only is this expansion driven by viewing habits we can see, we spoke directly to our audience to gain feedback on suggested changes before they were made.”