Amazon Prime Video is a success in many ways. As a competitor to the top streaming TV service Netflix, and a benefit of an Amazon Prime subscription, with overnight delivery, Amazon Music Unlimited, and more, on-demand TV has taken a firm hold on us. eyewear in recent years. years. With outstanding Amazon Originals like The Boys or The Marvelous Mrs Maisel, as well as big-name titles like The Farewell or The Handmaiden, it's not hard to see why viewers were drawn to the service, especially when a subscription will include all kinds of offers. exclusive retailers and faster delivery benefits. But there is still much room for improvement in the way users are forced to navigate the platform. The main problem with Amazon Prime Video is that it was so clearly developed as an offshoot of the main Amazon Retail website, rather than a full-fledged TV platform. This has led to a multitude of user experience issues, including the way TV seasons are listed separately in Amazon search results, rather than under a single banner, a continuation of the days when Amazon shipped DVDs instead of streaming hit series. Titles are always treated as one-time purchases, rather than the entertainment experiences viewers expect with a certain level of fluency. To even find titles in the browser app, you have to go to the search bar and select "Prime Video" between "Premium Beauty" and "Shoes and Bags."
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(Image credit: Amazon / TechRadar) 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 seasons in consecutive order. In browsers, search results are also launched with "sponsored" items in the retail section of the site, which means that even if you do a specific search on Prime Video, other purchasing options are offered to you. Our entertainment editor, Samuel Roberts, supports this design mindset: "They think they see Prime Video as a perk of being a Prime member, rather than a standalone service."
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Several TechRadar team members testified to problems with the Amazon Prime Video app resuming TV shows where they stopped. I've had comedies rebooted in the wrong episode, the bad season, and even in the wrong part of a new episode (skipping pre-credits scenes in Parks and Recreation, for example). These are small, irregular issues that are easy to resolve by manually finding your relevant episode. There are also many things that Amazon Prime Video does well, such as with its unique X-Ray feature, which leverages IMDb's production database to tell you which actors are on screen at any given time, notify you of the soundtrack that is being played. playing and just tell you general tidbits about the show.
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(Image credit: Amazon / TechRadar) One of the facets plaguing the service since its inception is the muddy gap between video content included or not included in a Prime subscription. There are plenty of titles available to rent or buy, and it's easy enough to browse the website's content lines and choose a title only to find out you'll have to pay more. This has been greatly improved by adding a "Free for Me" tab that lists free titles to watch with a Prime subscription, as opposed to the "Store" where rental/purchase titles are always listed. However, Amazon has a huge financial incentive to entice users into additional purchases, and tellingly, the home page always mixes these titles liberally, as well as movies and shows that require additional Amazon channel subscriptions, such as HBO, Showtime, Cinemax or MUBI. Displaying all available content and then launching the paywall once you've chosen a title is always misleading. For a Prime subscriber or someone drawn to Amazon-exclusive movies and shows, there are plenty of reasons to use it. But it's clear that Amazon Prime Video UI doesn't put the user (and by extension, the users) experience first. Today's best Amazon Prime deals