Amazon Prime Video is a success story in many ways. As a competitor to the leading TV streaming service Netflix, and a benefit of an Amazon Prime membership, including one-day delivery, Amazon Music Unlimited, and more, the on-demand television service has taken over our eyes recently. years.
With exceptional Amazon originals like The Boys or The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, along with high-profile titles like The Farewell or The Handmaiden, it’s not hard to see why viewers have been drawn to the service, especially when a subscription will include everything. kind of exclusive retail offers and faster delivery benefits. But there is still a lot of room for improvement in the way users are forced to navigate the platform.
The main problem with Amazon Prime Video is that it developed as clearly as a branch of the main Amazon Prime retail website, rather than a television platform in its own right.
That has led to a number of user experience issues, including the way television seasons are listed separately in Amazon’s search results, rather than being under a single banner, a continuation of the days when Amazon shipped DVDs instead of streaming successful series.
The titles are still treated as one-time purchases, rather than entertainment experiences that viewers expect to have a certain level of fluency. To even find titles in the browser application, you have to go to the search bar and select ‘Prime Video’ between ‘Premium Beauty’ and ‘Shoes and Bags’.
As a result, searching for Buffy the Vampire Slayer (or any Amazon TV show) is a visually confusing experience, and the platform can’t even manage to list the stations in consecutive order. In browsers, search results also start with ‘Sponsored’ items from the retail section of the site, which means that even if you’re specifically looking at Prime Video you’re presented with other purchase options.
Our entertainment editor Samuel Roberts supports this design mindset: “They believe they see Prime Video as a benefit of being a Prime member, rather than as a standalone service.”
You can resume
Several members of the TechRadar team have confirmed issues with the Amazon Prime Video app to resume TV shows where they also left them. I’ve had comedy ‘resumes’ in the wrong episode, the wrong season, and even the wrong part of a new episode (skipping the pre-credits scenes in Parks and Recreation, for example).
These are small, irregular problems, and are easily fixed by manually searching for your relevant episode. There are also a lot of things Amazon Prime Video is doing right, such as with its unique X-ray feature, which pulls the IMDb production database to tell you which actors are on-screen at any time, letting you know about the soundtrack playback. and just tell him general things about the show.
One facet that has plagued the service since its inception has been the split between video content included or not included in a Prime membership. There are many titles available to rent or buy, and it’s easy enough to flip through the content rows on the website and decide on a title only to find out that you’ll have to pay a surcharge.
This was greatly improved with the addition of a ‘Free to Me’ tab that lists titles that are free to view with a Prime membership, as opposed to the ‘Store’ where rental / purchase titles are still listed.
However, Amazon has a huge financial incentive to lure users toward additional purchases, and it’s telling that the homepage still combines these titles liberally, along with movies and shows that require additional Amazon Channels subscriptions like HBO, Showtime. , Cinemax or MUBI. Showing all available content, and then launching the paywall once you’ve decided on a title, always feels misleading.
For a Prime subscriber, or someone drawn to Amazon exclusive movies and shows, there are many reasons to use it. But it’s clear that the Amazon Prime Video user interface doesn’t put the user (and, by extension, users) experience first.
