Amazon announced a new Fire TV experience update alongside the Fire TV Stick (3rd gen) and Fire TV Stick Lite just last month. The new Fire TV update offers easier content discovery, improved Alexa voice controls, and the ability to add up to six user profiles. Amazon has now introduced Live TV integration on the Fire TV in India.
While several OTT apps offer live TV channels streaming, Amazon will show these channels in a unified tab within the Fire TV interface itself. Earlier, the interface had Home, Movies, TV Shows, Apps and Settings tabs in the navigation pane on the top. Now, the company has introduced a new ‘Live’ tab in the UI.
Amazon introduces Live TV on Fire TV interface
Apart from the ‘Live’ tab in the navigation pane, the Amazon Fire TV interface will also have an ‘On Now’ row on the home screen. This row will help users browse and access live TV content from subscribed apps. The interface will also offer an integrated channel guide for these subscribed apps in the ‘Options’ row of the ‘Live’ tab. This channel guide makes it convenient to choose favourite channels and find out what is being broadcasted live. There’s also an option for adding favourites and parental controls.
Amazon has announced that SonyLIV, Voot, Discovery+, NextG TV, and Zee5 (coming soon) are the first OTT platforms to integrate their Live TV experience in Fire TV UI. These apps offer popular channels like Sony SAB HD, Colors HD, SET HD, Nick HD+, Dangal, DD National, News18 India, MTV Beats HD, SONY BBC Earth HD, Mastii TV Music and Discovery. Once Zee5 is integrated, the ‘Live’ tab will also show Zee TV, Zee Cinema and Zee News.
However, Fire TV customers need to be subscribed to the aforementioned apps and have them downloaded on their Fire TV device to be able to see the ‘On Now’ row. The thumbnails on the row will have a red bar at the bottom to indicate the real-time progress of the show. Amazon has also added a voice control command for live TV channels to Alexa. Users will have to say, “Alexa, watch Discovery,” and the TV will start playing the channel.
The ‘Live’ tab will start rolling out in a phased manner starting from today and will be available to all existing Fire TV customers over the next few weeks. For new customers, the ‘Live’ tab will be available within a few weeks from when the device is activated. As mentioned before, the ‘On Now’ row will only be available to users who have downloaded and subscribed to apps offering live TV channels.