Amazon's Fire TV platform now has its own rival to Roku's popular free movie and television center, The Roku Channel. Amazon today inserted a new "free" section on Fire TV that makes it easier for customers to find movies, TV shows, news, and other free content through its apps, including IMDb TV and Twitch, as well as sources third parties like TUBI, Pluto TV, Crackle, The CW and others.
The tab will also direct users to other apps that offer free content like Red Bull, PBS and PBS Kids.
However, the browsing experience in the free section of Fire TV is slightly different from that of The Roku Channel. While the latter focuses only on content that can be streamed for free, the Amazon Fire TV section begins with a row of "featured apps." And Amazon's own app, IMDb TV, occupies a prime position.
Below, Amazon offers horizontal thematic rows of selected content. This includes a set of personalized recommendations for free movies and TV shows in categories like news, popular, and popular, as well as a dedicated line for the Amazon News app on Fire TV. Amazon says that most of the content on the Free tab will come from other providers, not from Amazon itself.
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In addition, the Free tab will include other types of free content to watch, including unlocked content from streaming services and a dedicated line for Kids & Family programming that is free via Prime Video.
Amazon says that through Fire TV, users have access to more than 20,000 free movies and TV episodes through apps like IMDb TV, Pluto TV, TUBI, etc. But the free tab doesn't necessarily try to include all of this content, just a selected selection.
The launch of the Free tab indicates that Amazon is aware of the challenge that Roku presents with its free movies and its TV center, which has become one of its main channels and attracts customers to its platform. Roku, in its first quarter 2020 results, said it now had 39.8 million active users at the end of March. Amazon, meanwhile, had Ad Over 40 million active in January, which means the two are still very close in terms of user growth.
The new free Amazon Fire TV tab is available today in the United States. USA