Amazon Prime Video Review
Satisfying enough but still areas for improvement
Verdict
A solid video streaming service with an enjoyable roster of original content and a massive library. It’s A/V performance is satisfactory, but Prime Video still feels a little clunky and the amount of content available is overwhelming. This service could benefit from being trimmer and more streamlined.
Pros
- Massive library
- Gets newer releases quicker than Netflix
- Satisfying AV performance
- Live sports programming
- Wide platform support
Cons
- Lots of content behind paywalls
- Dense interface
- Original content not the most frequent
- Curation doesn’t feel too personal
Key Features
- Full HDR supportHDR10+, Dolby Vision, and Filmmaker mode included
- 30-day free trialTake advantage of a free trial to test out the service
- Live sportsTennis and Premier League sports
Introduction
They say it’s been a golden age for TV shows, and the streaming boom has made it easier to find our favourite series on demand.
One major player is Amazon with Prime Video. It launched in 2006, making the hop over to UK shores in 2014 when it gobbled up LoveFilm Instant.
Since then, it’s become an established player in the UK market alongside iPlayer, and despite not getting as much attention as Netflix and Disney+, it arguably has the widest breath of content; a library with access to classics and international features, as well as a line-up of original content and sports in 4K HDR.
How good is Prime Video? Let’s find out.
Supported devices
- Vast device support
Like Netflix, Prime Video has wide availability. It’s on Amazon’s own devices in the Fire TV, Fire TV Stick, Echo, and Fire Tablets. Other streaming players include Chromecast, Nvidia Shield, Roku, Apple TV, Xiaomi, Strong, Sky Stream, and NOW among others, as well as set-top boxes from TiVO, Virgin Media, Sky Q and Humax.
Push beyond the Amazon ecosystem and there are Blu-ray players from LG, Panasonic, and Sony.
All the major TV brands carry the app as well as smaller ones whether it’s Hisense, LG, Panasonic, Philips, Samsung, Sony, Skyworth, Sky Glass, Toshiba, Vizio, TCL, JVC, Sharp and Grundig.
Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera are covered for browsers, along with Android, iOS, and Windows platforms. Sony game consoles from the PS3 to the PS5 are supported, while for Xbox it’s the Series X/S consoles back to the Xbox One.
Interface
- Visually better than before
- So much content to wade through
Prime Video’s revamp of its interface in the summer of 2022 made it easier to navigate and visually better. Issues remain, but this is a better effort.
It mirrors the Fire TV interface with a carousel that cycles through content from Prime and partnered channels. The ten slots include new and popular titles as well as advertisements for other channels (such as Freevee and Lionsgate+). Weirdly, it cycles through the titles once and then stops.
Below are five sections: All, Movies, TV shows, Sports and Family. Stay on the main page and the first row is a floating one, sometimes it’s a row of suggested movies, other times it’s the UK top ten. Then it’s followed by original/exclusive content, and subscriptions to other channels, which has pushed the Continue Watching bar down the page.
Personally, I’d prefer the ‘Continue…’ bar to be stationed higher – more like Apple TV+. I believe streaming services should encourage you to finish what you’ve started rather than chuck more stuff at you.
If you’re using the TV interface, the auto play trailers when hovering on a title can get tiring. It can be turned off in the settings.
Press the green button on the TV remote and you can add a title to your watchlist, remove it or hide it from view, the latter useful for programmes that have switched from streaming to rent/buy that you don’t want to see anymore.
There’s also a row for titles leaving the service, which is a useful reminder. The number of titles in each row varies – Top ten is obviously just ten – but the ‘leaving’ row had over 100, while I stopped counting on the ‘new movies’ row after I hit 200. That number encourages endless idle scrolling, and suggests a streaming service more about quantity than being succinct.
Then there are legions of rows such as ‘Recently added movies’, live and upcoming events (usually sports but sometimes music), ones that focus on a genre (Horror, Thriller, Romantic, Westerns); suggested titles (because you watched…), themed rows (Leading women, Movies by Warner Bros., LGBTQ+ movies), content from Prime Video Channels – and on and on. Perusing the interface feels as long as a Rings of Power episode.
Features
- Full HDR support
- Supports up to six profiles
- Group watching possible
Prime Video supports up to six profiles (including kids profiles), and there are parental controls to set restrictions for what can be seen or bought in the store.
Like other streaming services, Prime Video scales the A/V performance based on your equipment. Currently, there are no subscription tiers, but that’ll change when advertisements arrive in 2024. If you don’t want to see ads, you’ll have to pay extra.
There’s the IMDb X-Ray feature, which I think is Prime Video’s secret sauce for film and TV nerds that goes into the details of the cast, and offers trivia and facts. I like this feature a lot, useful when you see an actor and have their name on the tip of your tongue.
A/V support includes HDR10+ and Dolby Vision HDR, along with Filmmaker mode that’s automatically activated on Samsung and LG TVs. In terms of audio there’s Dolby Atmos, 5.1 or stereo. Subtitles, audio descriptions, and alternative languages are supported too.
A big issue, though, is Prime Video’s tagging of 4K HDR content, which is often incorrect. Dune (2021) claims to be a UHD title but it’s actually in HD, and the same is true for Wonder Woman 1984, Patriots Day, Bombshell. A Quiet Place, and La La Land. The stream never loads in UHD or HDR.
Prime Video also supports group viewing with its Watch Party. Up to 100 participants can join a session, but they must reside in your country. Watch Party is compatible with any Prime Video Channel or Freevee.
Curation
- A few suggestive rows
- Doesn’t feel particular personal
Prime Video doesn’t reveal much about its curation – in fact, there’s nothing I can find online, so it’s hard to know what basis the algorithm is feeding you titles.
There are rows of movies/TV shows Prime Video thinks you’ll like. On the landing page for each title, there’s a row of content other customers have watched to spur some inspiration for finding something new. There are also rows with suggestions based on your watch history. Having seen Catching Fire the list started filtering young adult films like Allegiant and The Mortal Instruments.
There’s a facility to rate titles like Netflix’s thumbs up/thumbs down, but all that really does is change the titles in the ‘because you like…’ row – it doesn’t appear to affect anything else. If you ‘liked’ something else afterwards, it’ll immediately change that row again, so all the titles that were previously there disappear.
Curiously, after I liked Amelie, that row suggested Amelie again, along with Manchester by the Sea (!), Annie Hall, Birdman, and Sound of Metal. If you give a title the thumbs down, it removes it from view.
It amounts to suggestions that don’t feel personal and more like new content Prime wants to put in front of your eyeballs. There are currently a lot of Tom Cruise films (perhaps a primer for Dead Reckoning’s home video release), as well as the Transformers series but I don’t remember watching anything related to those films.
Overall, curation feels by the numbers. Because I watched Dune the service recommended Catherine Called Birdy? I don’t see much of a connection between the two.
Library
- Vast library
- Live sports programming
- Gets newer titles faster than Netflix
Prime Video (the UK version at least) has, according to Just Watch, a mammoth 12370 titles as of September 2023, which compares favourably to Netflix’s 7565.
Of course, Prime Video licenses an enormous amount content from studios, while Netflix focuses on its original content (with a little help from Sony Pictures). Where Prime Video betters Netflix is that it gets ‘bigger’ films quicker. By quicker I don’t mean instant – usually less than two years – but more recent titles seem to pop up quicker than on Netflix.
As of September 2023, The Suicide Squad (2021) was available, as was The Matrix Resurrections (2021), King Richard (2021), In The Heights (2021), all Warner Bros.’ titles, incidentally. And there are smaller titles such as Till (2023), Women Talking (2023) and Alice, Darling (2023).
It’s also better in terms of older, cult films like the 80s version of Dune, 1984, Some Like It Hot, Heaven’s Gate, The Misfits, The Bishop’s Wife, Django, and The Killing (Kubrick version). If you’re looking for something from the past, Prime Video is quite decent, though it’s not too easy to find them.
As a service, Prime Video has a habit of mixing streaming titles with content you can rent, buy, or sample with a free trial via Prime Video Channels. Prime Video functions more like Apple TV in that it is both a streaming service and a store. At least Apple TV (mostly) separates its store and streaming services – Amazon has its cake and eats with both a store section and a streaming section with content you can rent and buy. It’s inescapable.
Original content is an area Amazon hasn’t been as strong as its rivals. Apple TV+ is better despite launching much later. The issue is not necessarily quality – I’d say Prime Video’s roster of originals is good – but the frequency of titles doesn’t feel as regular as its rivals.
The Terminal List, Daisy Jones & the Six, Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, The Peripheral, A League of Their Own, Invincible, and The Boys all range from good to very good (let’s ignore Citadel); and there is the sports-focused All or Nothing series, that’s good entertainment, though Netflix is catching up with Drive to Survive and Break Point.
Prime Video also has exclusives like Star Trek: Lower Decks, Vikings, and You Hurt My Feelings but these tend to lapse. Halt and Catch Fire and Mr Robot are no longer available, despite the poster art still saying ‘Amazon Exclusive’ even though Mr Robot is now on ITVX and Halt and Catch Fire is on Channel 4 (both are excellent by the way).
The original titles I listed don’t create as much buzz as much as the Disney+ MCU and Star Wars series (whatever you may think of them), or its FX titles (The Bear, Welcome to Wrexham). Apple TV+ has Ted Lasso, but also The Morning Show, Silo, Foundation, Hijack, For All Mankind, and Slow Horses. When was the last time you thought of watching an Amazon Original?
There are live sports, whether it’s ATP tennis tour or Premier League football, so if you like tennis, Prime is the service to subscribe to. There’s also an array of international titles on the service, content from India, Korea, anime, as well as Spanish language titles from South America.
There’s a lot of content on Prime Video, though the caveat is that not all of it is available through Prime streaming. Quantity is winning the battle over quality in some aspects of Prime Video’s performance.
Performance
- Satisfactory AV performance
- Not the widest Atmos support
Performance depends on the TV and sound system you have, but the performance is reliably good. Prime Video has enough content to take advantage of UHD resolution, HDR and Wide Colour Gamut.
Watching Daisy Jones on an LG and Samsung TV, and I preferred the Dolby Vision version. You can’t turn HDR off (or choose which one you want), but a few titles support both HDR10+ and Dolby Vision. From memory, Dolby Vision is prioritised, which is a slight surprise given Amazon was one of the early backers of HDR10+. Recently it’s added more titles in Dolby Vision, which is good to see given it’s the more common HDR format.
I wouldn’t class it as looking better than Apple TV+, which benefits from slicker production values (and almost certainly higher bit-rates). Filmmaker mode depends on your TV, and a premium OLED or Mini LED would bring out the best image quality; a cheaper LED set that doesn’t offer the best contrast, brightness of colour reproduction and a show like The Rings of Power can end up looking very mundane.
The sound quality is good, though Dolby Atmos support is not as wide as I’d hoped, even on Amazon’s Originals. You’d like to think every original programme is in Atmos, but it varies – The Terminal List doesn’t have it, but Rings of Power does. That’s a disappointment, especially if you have an Atmos capable surround system.
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Should you buy it?
If you’re a Prime subscriber
Prime Video comes part of an annual Prime sub, which means you get it as part of your subscription at no extra cost
If you want a streamlined service
You can stream, you can buy, you can rent; Amazon is happy whatever you do, but the amount of choice is overwhelming, not helped by content being behind paywalls either.
Final Thoughts
Prime Video is a solid service, with good AV credentials and a massive library, but it also offers an overwhelming amount of choice.
The interface is better, but curation doesn’t feel too personal; its roster of original programming is good, but others are stronger. It’s comparatively one of the more affordable options, but with a price hike set for 2024, you’ll need to pay more to avoid ads. That rather sums up Prime Video’s current state – the good points are quickly followed by caveats.
Prime Video is a video streaming service that’s nice to have but not yet essential for those who aren’t subscribers to Amazon Prime.
How we test
We test every video streaming service we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use industry standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Tested over several months
Tested with real world use
Tested on multiple devices
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FAQs
Yes, you can sample the service with a generous 30-day free trial, and once that’s done, it’ll auto-renew at £8.99/month.
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Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.
