Amazon Prime Video is now rolling out its long-awaited profiles feature to everyone worldwide, including its biggest subscriber market: the US. This comes nearly four months after the feature was introduced in India, and a few other markets. That means Amazon Prime subscribers can now create up to six profiles — up from Netflix’s five — which will all have their own separate recommendations, watchlists, and viewing history. Profiles can be a mix of adult and “Kids” profiles. There’s still no way to customise profile avatars, several months into launch.
Amazon first introduced profiles in March to select countries, including India, making Prime Video a better family service in a market where it had always been an affordable choice. TechCrunch reports that the profiles feature was also rolled out in parts of Africa then, and it’s now available in the rest of the world. If you don’t see it yet, fret not. Since it’s a roll-out, Amazon says it will take a few days to be available for every Prime Video user.
The few months Amazon has taken to test out the Prime Video profiles feature has also helped it fix some of its oversights. Prior to the global launch, you couldn’t switch between Prime Video profiles on most living room devices — which are usually shared between users — except for Fire TV (India-only) and select Apple TVs. Thankfully, it now works on Android TV and the PlayStation 4, Gadgets 360 has discovered, though profiles are still not supported on Xbox One.
Counter-intuitively, Prime Video profiles have always been available on personal devices, including Android and iOS devices, Amazon Fire tablets (except Fire Gen 9 or below), and in browsers. Now, if only Amazon could give us more variety with profile avatars, so we could differentiate ourselves from each other.
Can Netflix force Bollywood to reinvent itself? We discussed this on Orbital, our weekly technology podcast, which you can subscribe to via Apple Podcasts or RSS. You can also download the episode or just hit the play button below.