Whatever your feelings, I think we can all agree that Amazon is a massive company, and it’s managed to become a big-time player in the corporate world in a relatively short span of time.
In just over thirty years it’s become the world’s second largest company, born as a bookstore under the name of Cadabra in 1994 before changing its name a few months later to Amazon (there’s an amusing, if brief, story about the name change).
But despite its mammoth scale, Amazon is inexperienced in the world of TVs compared to many of its rivals, starting with the partnerships Amazon developed in 2017 (with the not so memorably named ‘Fire TV Edition’), before developing its own TVs (which were a mouthful to pronounce).
2026 sees its TVs re-branded again as the Amazon Ember series, and it’s at this moment that we have a sit-down with the Vice-President of Fire TV, Aidan Marcuss, for a brief state of play about Fire TV. Here’s the first part of our chat on a hot London day at Amazon’s HQ in Shoreditch.
“We didn’t just move pixels – we rewrote the Fire TV experience”
By now, if you have an Amazon Fire TV Ember series model or a Fire TV streamer, you’d have notice the furniture has changed – Amazon has had a look at the current arrangement and played with the Feng shui of the Fire TV interface.
This “All-New” Fire TV experience follows on from the previous “All-New” version, which seemed to improve things initially before getting bogged down in what I’d describe as ‘too much content’.
Amazon believes the new interface is a step forward but just how well has the rollout gone?
Well, given Aidan has “been through a couple interface updates” in his time at Microsoft, he thinks that Amazon “are very pleased with customer reception… we did add a fair amount of surface area, we added the ability to see the movies you have… TV shows you have access to… live sports that you have access to, or news, and what we’re seeing is that enhanced sort of organisation is helping customers find more to watch.”
While he couldn’t give any “fixed” data at the time of the chat, he did say that “the data is very, very clear that customers are finding more , and which is really… the job… the job is helping people find more quickly.”
(After the interview, Amazon dug out in the info “that customers exploring the new content nodes are finding and playing content up to 4 times the rate of those that stay on the Home screen.”)
And with all the current Fire TV devices updated, “they’re all shipping with the new UI in time for Prime Day [June 2026], so anyone who buys a new device for Prime Day will get access to our new user experience, and that’s how confident we are in it, just delivering a better experience for customers.”
But what does that “better experience” mean for customers?
Better experience means that Amazon Fire TV strives “to have the broadest selection of content available to customers. That means having all of the apps available that customers use to watch content. It means increasingly not just having streaming apps, but it means having live TV, and live TV integrated experience.”
“It means having gaming, gaming apps [in] Xbox, Luna, GeForce Now integrated into the experience, and it means that that’s accessible through search across all of those things.”
“If you search for something, [you] should be able to find it, regardless of what service it’s in, and if it’s on live, we should be able to put it in front of you live on one of those tiles, so you can find a live piece of content.”
Immediacy and ease of use is what makes for a better experience in Amazon’s view. But live broadcasts are a different beast to finding something that already exists as oppose to something that’s currently unfurling. How would Fire TV bring it to my attention?
“We’ve done the technical work so live TV feels like a first‑class part of the Fire TV experience, not an afterthought”
Amazon recognises that live TV has become a big part of the viewing experience, and it’s importance is “growing year on year. The number of customers we have watching on Fire TV, is growing year on year. So it’s really critically important for us, and I think you see it in the integrations that we do. For example, having Freely on our televisions here in the UK is an example of making sure we bring the best local experience forward for our customer in terms of live TV.”
“And it’s what we’re always working on with partners, is how do we make sure we can bring their live content front and centre, and… from our perspective, live TV is very technically different than streaming TV. You think about what we’ve had to do as a product team. When you have a catalogue of shows on a streaming service, it’s like a library catalogue.”
“From our perspective, live TV is… technically, it’s very different than streaming TV… there’s an event, it’s on at a particular time and it’s no longer on. And so, how you search for it, surface it to a customer? It might be available on multiple channels. So, which one do you pick? All of that is examples of technical work we’ve done to make sure live TV feels like a first class part of our experience.”
That’s it for the first part of our chat with Aidan Marcuss, Vice-President of Amazon Fire TV. Tune in for the next part where we cover Alexa, content discovery, personalisation, and the security of the Fire TV platform.
