Amazon Updates Prime Video on Apple TV with New accessibility features, More

According to The Verge’s Emma Roth, Amazon this week released a substantial update to its Prime Video app on tvOS. The enhancements include higher resolution poster art, integration with the touchpad on the Apple TV’s Siri Remote, and most interestingly for me, support for accessibility features such as VoiceOver, Hover Text, and Bold Text.

The update runs on all Apple TV 4K models, as well as the decommissioned Apple TV HD.

After reading Roth’s story late yesterday, I installed the update on the Apple TV in the living room and played around in the user interface before watching the first few minutes of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer. My first impressions are Amazon did a really nice job with this upgrade; the artwork looks spectacular on my brand-new 77” LG C3 OLED television and the trackpad gestures work swimmingly. The only bad thing I noticed was, best to my knowledge, the new Prime Video app seemingly doesn’t support Amazon’s X-Ray feature any longer. Maybe it does have it, but I missed it.

The Prime Video news came as a surprise to me, as I’ve been content with the version Amazon rolled out several months ago. Last July, I published a piece on the new app after going down to Culver City on a reporting trip and visiting Amazon MGM Studios for a small-ish media event around Prime Video. My reporting of the event featured in-person (!) interviews with Prime Video executives Raf Soltanovich and Kam Keshmiri. Both men talked with me about how the then-unreleased new Prime Video app had been built with accessibility top of mind, as accessibility is important to Amazon.

Jason Snell put it well when linking to Roth’s report: “There was a time when Prime Video was one of the worst major streamer apps on tvOS, but those days are over.”