We asked, you told us: Over half of you hate the Prime Video experience

Amazon is spending almost $9 billion on its purchase of MGM, with the intention of bolstering the Prime Video catalog. However, I personally think Prime Video’s biggest issue isn’t content but rather the user experience. In fact, I said as much in an opinion piece over the weekend.

I also wanted to know what Android Authority readers thought of the Prime Video experience, leaving a poll at the end of the article. So did you agree with the assessment or do you think Prime Video delivers a good experience? Here’s how you voted.

What do you think of the Prime Video experience?

Results

We posted the poll on May 29, and just over 1,000 votes were tallied as of writing. Interestingly enough, just 17.58% of respondents say they like the Prime Video experience. Some comments praised Amazon’s streaming service for the library of content, the X-Ray feature, and the value due to it being included with Amazon Prime.

More voters (29.2%) felt indifferent to Prime Video though, perhaps feeling that the experience isn’t bad but isn’t good either.

Nevertheless, a grand total of 53.22% of respondents said they actually hate the Prime Video experience. That’s triple the number of votes compared to the “I like it” camp. Comments pointed to content discovery challenges, the interface in general, ads, and more.

Of course, this poll isn’t necessarily indicative of Prime Video subscribers at large. But it still suggests that Amazon has a long way to go if it wants most people to actually enjoy using the streaming service.

Comments

• Ben Baggley: It’s pretty bad for sure. It used to also list 4k content separately. I remember when The Boys first released, the front page highlighted it for me and I spent a few episodes watching in 1080p before realising if I searched for the show, I would be able to watch the 4k version. Honestly, I’m not a fan of the entire Amazon experience. It’s often incredibly tedious to find what you’re looking for.
• Joshua R. Poulson: No, the biggest issue is that you can buy something and you can still lose access to it and they don’t refund it. I bought the series “Rubicon” a long time ago. It was removed. And when it got added back in again, my old purchase wasn’t valid. They also briefly removed the documentary “Hoaxed”. They just can’t be trusted.
• Wendi martin: I really like Amazon prime. I agree with some of the complaints but they have a huge library and a lot more shows I actually want to watch then netflix. netflix works well but what good is that when 3/4 of the content is tripe.
• lilli stern: Really hate the 181 second ads!!
• pda96: Prime Video is light years behind Netflix in terms of content and user interface. The latter is an unmitigated mess. The user has to spend a long amount of time searching for a suitable movie to watch. There is no way of getting rid of the “Continue Watching” movies permanently. They keep reappearing even after you remove them from the list. So annoying!! Amazon probably thinks that because Prime Video is a freebie to Prime members, there is no need to improve the experience. Spend a tiny bit of your billions to fix this, oh Mr. Cheapskate Bezos!!
• 🇦🇺Marshall: It’s not the most polished experience for sure, I find Netflix and Stan easier to use, but for what it is – a bonus feature to free Amazon shipping – it goes alright. I find content recommendations across all streaming platforms to be terrible, so that isn’t news.
• DigitalSoul: The Amazon Prime mini game to find content is the most successful game produced by Amazon Game Studios. It is awful, no idea why they’ve never bothered fixing it.
• Paul Balyoz: What I love about amazon prime content is the XRay feature – for any given scene you can see who the actors are, and sometimes the music being played. But some shows/movies don’t have enough data these days, showing only a few actors for the entire movie, unchangingly, instead of specific to the current scene.  

Thanks for voting in this poll and for leaving a comment. What do you make of Prime Video in general? Let us know via the comments section.