Prime Video is testing an exciting new feature that uses AI to better recommend movies and shows
- ‘AI Topics’ analyzes your viewing behavior to come up with recommendations
- Categories and descriptions are created by a large language model
- US only and currently in beta testing
Amazon has come up with a modern solution to an age-old problem: How do you find something to watch when there are so many options? It’s not exclusively a streaming problem, but the sheer choice of top streaming services has made it significantly worse – so Amazon wants to solve this with the power of AI.
The new feature is called ‘AI Topics’ and is currently exclusive to US Prime Video users. It won’t appear on every US TV or streaming box, as it’s a limited beta for “select customers.”
If you’re one of those customers, you should see the new “AI Topics” section when you scroll down. From there, you can get AI-powered help finding your next favorite best Prime Video show or best Prime Video movie.
What do Amazon AI topics actually do?
Amazon’s system analyzes your viewing experience to create a selection of recommendations from Prime Video’s extensive catalog based on that history, organized into individual topics. You can view a recommended title by clicking on it, or explore the topic in more detail to refine the recommendations.
‘AI Topics’ also generates descriptive names for the topics it identifies. Amazon gives examples including ‘mind-boggling sci-fi’ and ‘fantasy quests’. Other topics include classic comedies, ‘chilling suspense’ or ‘frontier justice’. And when a topic is generated, AI Topics also generates related topics to expand the recommendations a little further.
Here you can read how this works in practice. If you watch a lot of exciting movies, Amazon’s AI can create a topic of ‘Thrilling Character Journeys’ including Jack Ryan, The Batman, Inception, Memento and The Shawshank Redemption. They’re all very different movies, but you can see the thread the AI used to select them.
Below that you’ll find the additional topics, which simply appear as clickable sentences: ‘Spider Universe’, ‘Real Life Transformations’, ‘Vengeance Thrillers’, ‘Dark Delights’ and so on. And right below that are even more recommendations for the current topic, in this example Se7en, Thirteen lives, widow And joker.
You might quibble with some of the choices here, or the descriptions. Aren’t most films meant to be ‘Exciting Character Journeys’? – but it’s a rare streaming subscriber who hasn’t spent much time scrolling, and this should make that a little less likely.
AI will clearly become an increasingly large part of our entertainment experience. So if Amazon is looking for more ideas, this is one: AI-powered ad placement. Imagine ads appearing like the ones on TV back in the day, with the ads appearing at sensible times instead of just randomly interrupting important scenes with: ‘hello [I don’t care if the hero is gasping his last] buy a kindle’. Just a thought…
