Apple and Amazon haven’t always played nicely together. The two have been locked in competition for years in the Streaming Wars, so it must be so awkward for each of them to have a streaming app available on the other’s streaming device. Like working in an office with your ex.
In a victory for cooperation, Amazon has integrated Apple’s unique features more heavily into its Prime Video app for Apple TV devices, such as the fantastic Apple TV 4K that seems to operate at the speed of light.
Drawing from Apple’s unique toolkit of accessibility features and Apple TV’s remote control, the tvOS operating system and Prime Video seem more seamlessly blended than ever.
Faster search and menu scrolling
Predictive text completion comes to the search box within the app, as well. Think of it like how your phone will suggest possible phrases or terms once you enter a few letters of what you want to look for.
It’s hardly cutting edge—most streaming apps have offered this for years—but if it saves time when awkwardly, slowly typing via remote control, then I’m all for it. It just had better work better than it does on my ducking iPhone. Oh, and you can use voice typing through the push-to-talk button on the remote to search for titles within the app now, too.
But it’s the touchpad gestures that have got my attention. You can now just swap in any direction on the Apple TV remote to navigate screens, and swiping forward or backward will scroll the video playback when you’re in the midst of watching something.
It’s giving me throwback vibes to both the original iPod and the recent Sonos Arc Ultra, in which gestures like this are so much more intuitive and quick, yet also more accurate, than clicking button after button. Several of Apple’s Accessibility features, such as VoiceOver, Hover Text, and Bold Text, are now available on the Apple TV’s Prime Video app, too.
You can also choose to enable sound effects and slight menu animations while swiping through the menus, which seems… fine? It might be cool, but it’s not headline news.
Images receive higher resolution on the screens, too, which is another welcome but humdrum update that’d normally be buried in the change log. Apple or Amazon (or both) must be really trying to pad out the fanfare over the latest update.
Still, the gestures are a nice touch. The inherent clumsiness of scrolling and typing via buttons on a remote control is one of the major hangups common to TV streaming devices in general. Anything that can sweep that away is a major win.
The post Amazon Prime Video Majorly Updates Streaming App for Apple TV Devices appeared first on VICE.
