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The New Fire TV Finally Offers a Decent Streaming Experience
Fire TV has been due for an update for a minute—a very long minute. With its latest experience overhaul, Fire TV is finally delivering a user interface that stands up to those of rival streaming devices.
When Chromecast with Google TV arrived on the scene this year, Google gave other $50 streaming devices a run for their money. It’s well designed, snappy, and delivers clean and organized recommendations with a layout that just works. At the time, both the Roku and Fire TV experiences seemed clunky by comparison. But the new Fire TV update offers a far better experience for the Alexa set who prefer it to other streaming devices, with new navigation tools for finding content, the addition of user profiles for more customized viewing, and a vastly improved home screen. Fire TV Stick Lite and third-generation Fire TV Stick users will get it first, and Amazon has said other devices will get the update in early 2021.
The first thing existing Fire TV users will notice is a reorganization of apps, menus, and content. Rather than the primary navigation features being situated at the top of the home screen, they now appear closer to the middle under a spotlight banner for content and feature promotion. This new menu is also where you’ll find icons for your primary apps, with a “more” button to the right that will bring up the rest. I quite liked this design, as I find I generally only hop between four or five primary apps at any given time depending on what I’ve been watching. Below this row on the home screen, you’ll find categories for “next up,” recently used apps, Prime originals, live and upcoming events, recommendations for ad-supported IMDb TV content (which is owned by Amazon and appears everywhere on Fire TV), as well as genre- and app-specific content suggestions.
