Amazon Rolls Out All-New Fire TV Interface With User Profiles To Streaming Sticks And Smart TVs
Amazon’s Fire TV experience is an all-in-one way to watch television shows, movies, and more. The platform is getting better, with a user interface update coming today. The update, announced back in September, brings a redesigned home screen, a new search experience, and user profiles to make life easier.
First and foremost is the redesigned home screen, which takes the cake as the best part of this update. Amazon described it as “the single destination for you to access all of your fave content.” From here, you can bounce between TV shows or movies over to the main menu that has options such as “Find, Live, Library” and pinned apps that you want easy access.
The “Find” section you access through the main menu also has its own new experience. The goal of the “Find” update is to make it easier to “search and browse by popular categories like movies, TV shows, free ad-supported content, and sports.” Furthermore, users can filter things by categories such as “comedy” or “action” to make searching for the right show or movie simple. Also, users can now find “additional experiences available on your Fire TV, like cooking classes with Food Network Kitchen, daily fitness with Peloton, or learning new skills with MasterClass.”
Besides the UI updates, Fire TV is finally catching up to other streaming services by offering user profiles. Everyone in the family may have different tastes when it comes to movies and TV. Locking everyone to one account can mess up the algorithm that serves content, so it will be harder to find what you like. However, these new profiles will “support personalized recommendations, viewing history, watch lists, preferred settings, and more.” There can also be profiles for the kids, limiting what content can be watched on the platform.
Finally, as Fire TV is an Amazon product, it would be remiss if Amazon Alexa was left out, so “the all-new Fire TV experience is designed with Alexa at its core.” Users will be able to use Alexa commands to navigate if they do not want to use the new main menu. Also, Alexa is integrated with the profiles, so using voice recognition, Alexa will switch to your profile.
There is also a lot more you can do with Alexa on Fire TV now, but there is too much to write about. You can check out the Amazon blog post from September or update your Fire TV device today and start exploring what Amazon has to offer. If you get to tinker around with all of the new features, let us know what you think of them in the comments below.
