I hate it when streaming services like Amazon Prime Video introduce unique features, only to ditch them for whatever reason. If I had the power, I’d bring these features back to Prime Video.
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“Free To Me” Made Prime Video Easier to Navigate
My biggest gripe with Amazon Prime Video is its UI. I can’t stand how everything looks so cramped, and the little yellow icon that indicates content has to be bought or rented to watch drives me crazy. In fact, it’s one of the biggest factors in how I pick between Netflix and Prime when I want to watch something.
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With Prime’s Free To Me feature, content that had to be rented or bought was filtered out, making it so much easier to pick something and relax for the night. Free To Me was an objectively good feature, and I’ll never understand why it was removed. There’s no reason that’s good enough for me.
Instead, Free To Me was removed in favor of a nondescript “Prime” page. Didn’t know Prime filtered out content that way? Neither did I. How could I? “Prime” could mean any and everything available. Also, Prime Video defaults to the page containing subscription content, rentals, and movies you can buy. Free To Me should have stayed around; otherwise, it’s confusing.
2
Enjoying Content Together With a Watch Party
I may be able to regularly schedule D&D sessions every week, but getting people to gather for an episode of a show or movie is, for some reason, a scheduling nightmare. You’d think the opposite would be true, but that’s how it plays out for me. Amazon Prime Video’s Watch Party feature made it much easier to gather friends and family and enjoy a movie together, especially during the height of the COVID pandemic. We could synchronize playback and chat with one another.
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The worst part is Watch Party was discontinued without a peep from Amazon. Removing a feature is one thing, but to do so without an official statement is scummy. It devalued my Prime membership overnight. I wouldn’t have kicked up a fuss if, say, it was rolled into Prime Video’s higher tier.
Now I have to use alternative solutions to watching movies online together, like Teleparty and Discord. However, my friends and family may not want to install new tools due to inconvenience, device support, or they just don’t want to use entirely new software.
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Prime Video’s Episode Shuffle Was Underappreciated
There are a handful of sitcoms I watch on repeat, like Seinfeld and The Office, whenever I’m doing laundry, dishes, cleaning, or just want to relax or sleep. It’s like background noise that keeps my brain mildly occupied when I’m doing boring chores. However, to prevent myself from watching the same episode over and over, I really liked using Amazon Prime Video’s Episode Shuffle feature. It would play a randomly chosen episode, as opposed to watching it start to finish. And since they were sitcoms, I didn’t have to worry about continuity.
While I understand why this feature was removed, with it being rather niche and all, I still used it quite a lot. In its defense, I don’t recall it being advertised very often. Maybe if more people knew it existed in the first place, it wouldn’t have been so underappreciated. There are plenty of sitcoms, not to mention cartoons, that would’ve benefited from it.
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I also mourn the possibility of Amazon expanding on the feature into something like Netflix’s Surprise Me feature, which was also axed, among other features Netflix killed off. Sometimes I get choice paralysis seeing my growing watch list. What’s a guy gotta do to get streaming services to keep a simple shuffle button around?
I’m all about a better user experience, so when features like these get axed, I’m less inclined to use the service. Gutting Free To Me was especially egregious. Finding content that’s freely available due to my Amazon Prime subscription is a nightmare otherwise. Watch Party was great to have when schedules weren’t syncing, and Episode Shuffle was nice when I wanted to turn my brain off. Amazon Prime Video dropped the ball on these features.
