Amazon is revamping the Fire TV, launching its “Artline” TVs with bezels at CES

Amazon is rolling out a Fire TV redesign that’s more content-focused, while also simplifying navigation and layout. The update marks the first major Fire TV release in years from a user experience perspective, the company says, and is accompanied by an updated version of the Fire TV app and the arrival of new Fire TV devices featuring colorful bezels.

The company saw the need to change the look and feel of Fire TV due to the increasing amount of streaming content over the years. Today’s Fire TV customers can access TV and movies via purchases, rentals, and streaming services, but they also have apps to view short-form content on TV, and access multiple live TV broadcasts, premium content, podcasts, music, games, and more.

A simpler design for Fire TV

“As we delivered that content, (the user interface) got a little cluttered — too many things, too many rows,” Fire TV vice president Aidan Marcus explained in an interview with TechCrunch. “We know the data, and we’ve spent a lot of time researching,” he added. “We…we know it might be easier.”

The new user interface features several design changes, including rounded corners, varied gradients, consistent typography, and increased spacing between content to make the interface less cluttered. While you can still scroll down to see your favorite rows, such as Next Step, you can also see your apps in an expanded horizontal row.

Before, you could just… Install six applications To the Fire TV home screen – a common user complaint. But the update reduced the size of application icons, allowing more to appear on the home screen, and offers you 20 application slots that you can scroll through.

At the top of the screen, navigation has been simplified into clear categories like Movies, TV, Live TV, Sports, and News. A search button is available to the left of the Home tab.

Via the new tabs, Fire TV centralizes access to the content you’re already watching, and what’s available across the services you’re subscribed to. It also gives you the ability to discover new content, including recommended movies or shows (in rows labeled “For You”), free movies you can stream, lists of the best movies or shows, and other subscription content you might want to try.

These pages don’t offer infinite scrolling, but they are long because they represent the depth of content available on streaming services.

The new Live TV tab organizes live content from services that have live TV built into them, as well as streaming or cable TV, if you subscribe. The Sports section, more specifically, includes access to live games now and other scheduled sports content.

Other TV features are located under the three-line hamburger menu icon, such as Games, Arts, Photos, App Store, Videos, Music, Sound, a global watchlist now (“My Stuff”), Settings, and other options.

To make commonly used settings easier to access, you can now also long press the Home button to adjust display and sound settings, set a sleep timer, use accessibility features, access smart home features, and more. With this panel, you can do things like adjust the TV’s brightness, boost voice dialogue, or display the Ring camera feed on the screen while you’re watching, among other things.

The redesign also includes rewritten code that makes the interface move faster on some devices, Amazon claims.

“On our most popular devices, this is 20% to 30% faster for the same functions, because it’s all about getting people to what they want to watch quickly,” Marcus says.

AI comes built-in

Naturally, Alexa+ access is built-in, allowing users to ask questions, find content, or even do things like call Uber. This AI-powered assistant allows users to ask questions in natural language, refine their queries while chatting, ask follow-ups, and use visual context. For example, you can say, “Tell me more about that,” when you have a square box of a movie or TV show selected on the screen. You can also ask questions with some nuance, such as “Find me more movies that have the same format,” or ask them to help you find photos or artwork.

Alexa+ will be available as an add-on subscription after it exits Early Access (which currently requires a subscription). The AI ​​service will also be included in the Prime subscription.

Meanwhile, the Fire TV app has also been updated to offer the classic remote with a new way to discover new content. The idea is that people might want to browse for something to watch on their phone rather than just one person driving the content discovery and search experience with a remote.

The updated Fire TV interface and mobile app will begin rolling out in February on the Fire TV Stick 4K Plus, Fire TV Stick 4K Max (2nd generation), and Fire TV Omni Mini-LED series in the US

Later this spring, the redesign will be coming to more countries and more devices, including the Fire TV Cube (3rd generation), the latest generation Fire TV 2 series, the Fire TV 4 series, the Fire TV Omni QLED series, and TVs made by partners like Hisense, Panasonic, and TCL.

It will also be available at launch on new Amazon Ember Artline TVs. (see below).

Ember Artline TVs: Amazon’s new TVs that look like art

The Ember Artline TVs are the latest TVs from Amazon that come with a frame that can match the style and colors of your room. It will be available in 55-inch and 65-inch options, starting at $899.

The new TVs themselves offer 4K QLED displays with 800 nits of brightness. The screen is also thin, measuring an inch and a half, and has a matte screen to reduce glare.

The TVs also support Dolby Vision, HDR10+, and Wi-Fi 6.

However, the big selling point are the ten different frame options you can choose from, which offer a variety of colours, textures and geometries. This allows customers to take better advantage of the features surrounding Fire TV, which includes displaying artwork when the TV is not in use.

Available colors include walnut, ash, teak, black oak, matte white, midnight blue, fig, pale gold, graphite, and silver.

Fire TV comes with access to over 2,000 free pieces of art, or you can use your own photos.

You can also ask Alexa+ to show specific photos from your Amazon Photos collections using commands like, “Alexa, create a slideshow of our family trip to Colorado” or “Alexa, show photos from our wedding.”